Northern Lights Tours

The auroras are made up of a series of electrically discharged particles from the sun that enter earth's magnetic shield and create a light when mixed with gasses (such as nitrogen and oxygen) in our atmosphere. The particles come a long way through space before being drawn into earth’s polar regions, although it only takes a couple of days to travel the full 150 million kilometres!

The temperature above the sun surface is millions of degrees Celsius. At this temperature, collisions between gas molecules are frequent and explosive particles enter the earth's atmosphere and collide with gas particles. These collisions emit light that we perceive as the dancing lights above the magnetic poles of the northern and southern hemispheres. They are known as 'Aurora borealis' in the north and 'Aurora australis' in the south.