The great astral sneeze

Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why

-  Harry Pearson

On clear and frosted northern nights, if you are very lucky, green, blue, red and violet sheets of light as diaphanous as chiffon and shimmering like silk will come pouring into the dark bowl of the winter sky and prance and flicker for your entertainment. The Northern Lights are one of Nature's most astonishing displays, a thing of jaw-dropping wonder. They are a sight, as Lancashire-born Bard of the Yukon Robert Service said, 'for the eyes of God'.

To our ancestors, the quivering spirals, beams and rods that danced above the horizon appeared supernatural: the glimmering armour of dead warriors, the breath of fallen heroes, the writhing fiery forms of battling dragons or a shimmering reflection of vast shoals of silver herring breasting the Arctic Ocean. They appeared a portent, the result of a rip in the flimsy wall that divided the physical world from the territory of ghosts. They could be both a sign and cause of coming disaster, of plague or famine. Displays of Northern Lights are said to have preceded the assassination of Julius Caesar, the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus and the murder of Thomas Becket.