The northern lights happened in area close to the magnetic poles. They offer a breath taking show. In Greenland, the team went through a night darker and darker , and was lucky enought to witness this extraordinary event. Commentary.

It was a night in this polar night, which now looks increasingly long and dark, a solar plasma blown into space at several hundred km / s by our star and who managed to live up to the Earth's magnetosphere, rushes between the field lines to drive there in the dark sky just above our heads, nitrogen and oxygen atoms in luminescence gigantic and moving of green, red, blue, yellow ...

The northern lights suddenly lit up the sky, yet plunged into the dark night.

These are the polar lights, the northern lights more exactly in these northern latitudes. And despite the relatively indigestible scientific explanation, auroras always seem to be magic rather than astrophysics. Because they unfolded to us like that, without warning, with the power to stop time paralyzing us outside the cabin, eyes wide.

They mainly generated beatitude and majestic "wouaws" to make us completely forget the icy cold of the arctic night and the stiff necks which unbalanced our positions already very arched towards the sky.

On several occasions, members of the team had the chance to observe this phenomenon

In fact, several times in the end of the expedition, we were fortunate to have had a few hours of dark night, that is to say cloudless and moonless when suddenly the sky lit with thousands of lights.

So it was positioned there, in small groups, to contemplate a magical show where in the strangest silence, the night suddenly shone through the immense curtain of lights that descended from the stars, dancing, grew, faded and then reappeared over another horizonOr the zenith vertical to our cabin, or arose before us above the fjord, gently illuminating the sea and icebergs asleep.

"What a dazzling and poetic experience to live our polar adventure in these soft and large celestial flames, soothing and unreal. It was rejuvenating to contemplate without grasping the meaning and thus let the mind wander freely in space. Just hoping that this fantastic keepsake hard and does not evaporate as a nice dream "

Over the sky is dark and clear, more auroras are visible.

Just like this experience, the members of this adventure will have to tell their relatives 'how it was' an expedition around the world.

And as alwaysIt will be complicated but exciting to try to describe the feeling, share the emotions experienced and convey this desire to go further.

A L'ORIGINE

It's a bit the same principle as neon lights, but in the sky. The gas molecules in the upper atmosphere are electrically excited by solar particles and thereby diffuse light.

WHERE AND WHEN TO OBSERVE?

When auroras occur, it is always at the same time in the Arctic region (northern lights) and Antarctic (southern lights) on the circumpolar region known as "auroral oval", located around each magnetic pole. By cons, no relation to our summers / winters, days / nights, auroras are phenomena related to solar activity. Still, over the sky of our high latitudes is dark and clear, the more lights will be visible.

LEARN MORE

There are many mobile applications and websites that deliver information on solar activity peaks to predict where the lights will be most intense. We have chosen two, one in French and one in EnglishBut the list is not exhaustive. And if you have the chance to travel far, know that the aurora are also found on other planets with a magnetic field. Jupiter, for example, auroras are much larger than on Earth!

Here is a video produced by the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie, to better understand this phenomenon:
http://www.universcience.tv/video-satellite-aurores-boreales-651.html