Glitz

aurora, polara

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/northern_lights
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tulikettu#Finnish


The term aurora borealis was coined by Galileo in 1619, from the Roman Aurora, goddess of the dawn and the Greek name for the north wind (Boreas).

The word aurora is derived from the name of the Roman goddess of the dawn, Aurora, who travelled from east to west announcing the coming of the sun. Ancient Greek poets used the corresponding name Eos metaphorically to refer to dawn, often mentioning its play of colors across the otherwise dark sky (e.g., "rosy-fingered dawn").

The words borealis and australis are derived from the names of the ancient gods of the north wind (Boreas) and the south wind (Auster) in Greek mythology.


The earliest datable record of an aurora was recorded in the Bamboo Annals, a historical chronicle of the history of ancient China, in 977 or 957 BC.[77] An aurora was described by the Greek explorer Pytheas in the 4th century BC.[78] Seneca wrote about auroras in the first book of his Naturales Quaestiones, classifying them, for instance, as pithaei ('barrel-like'); chasmata ('chasm'); pogoniae ('bearded'); cyparissae ('like cypress trees'); and describing their manifold colors. He wrote about whether they were above or below the clouds, and recalled that under Tiberius, an aurora formed above the port city of Ostia that was so intense and red that a cohort of the army, stationed nearby for fire duty, galloped to the rescue.[79] It has been suggested that Pliny the Elder depicted the aurora borealis in his Natural History, when he refers to trabes, chasma, 'falling red flames', and 'daylight in the night'.[80]

The earliest depiction of the aurora may have been in Cro-Magnon cave paintings of northern Spain dating to 30,000 BC.[81]

The oldest known written record of the aurora was in a Chinese legend written around 2600 BC. On an autumn around 2000 BC,[82] according to a legend, a young woman named Fubao was sitting alone in the wilderness by a bay, when suddenly a "magical band of light" appeared like "moving clouds and flowing water", turning into a bright halo around the Big Dipper, which cascaded a pale silver brilliance, illuminating the earth and making shapes and shadows seem alive. Moved by this sight, Fubao became pregnant and gave birth to a son, the Emperor Xuanyuan, known legendarily as the initiator of Chinese culture and the ancestor of all Chinese people.[citation needed] In the Shanhaijing, a creature named Shilong is described to be like a red dragon shining in the night sky with a body a thousand miles long. In ancient times, the Chinese did not have a fixed word for the aurora, so it was named according to the different shapes of the aurora, such as "Sky Dog" (天狗), "Sword/Knife Star" (刀星), "Chiyou banner" (蚩尤旗), "Sky's Open Eyes" (天开眼), and "Stars like Rain" (星陨如雨).[citation needed]

In Japanese folklore, pheasants were considered messengers from heaven. However, researchers from Japan's Graduate University for Advanced Studies and National Institute of Polar Research claimed in March 2020 that red pheasant tails witnessed across the night sky over Japan in 620 A.D., might be a red aurora produced during a magnetic storm.[83]
The Aboriginal Australians associated auroras (which are mainly low on the horizon and predominantly red) with fire.

In the traditions of Aboriginal Australians, the Aurora Australis is commonly associated with fire. For example, the Gunditjmara people of western Victoria called auroras puae buae ('ashes'), while the Gunai people of eastern Victoria perceived auroras as bushfires in the spirit world. The Dieri people of South Australia say that an auroral display is kootchee, an evil spirit creating a large fire. Similarly, the Ngarrindjeri people of South Australia refer to auroras seen over Kangaroo Island as the campfires of spirits in the 'Land of the Dead'. Aboriginal people[which?] in southwest Queensland believe the auroras to be the fires of the Oola Pikka, ghostly spirits who spoke to the people through auroras. Sacred law forbade anyone except male elders from watching or interpreting the messages of ancestors they believed were transmitted through an aurora.[84]

Among the Māori people of New Zealand, aurora australis or Tahunui-a-rangi ("great torches in the sky") were alight by ancestors who sailed south to a "land of ice" (or their descendants);[85][86] these people were said to be Ui-te-Rangiora's expedition party who had reached the Southern Ocean.[85] around the 7th century.[87]
Aurora pictured as wreath of rays in the coat of arms of Utsjoki

In Scandinavia, the first mention of norðrljós (the northern lights) is found in the Norwegian chronicle Konungs Skuggsjá from AD 1230. The chronicler has heard about this phenomenon from compatriots returning from Greenland, and he gives three possible explanations: that the ocean was surrounded by vast fires; that the sun flares could reach around the world to its night side; or that glaciers could store energy so that they eventually became fluorescent.[88]

Walter William Bryant wrote in his book Kepler (1920) that Tycho Brahe "seems to have been something of a homœopathist, for he recommends sulfur to cure infectious diseases 'brought on by the sulphurous vapours of the Aurora Borealis'".[89]

In 1778, Benjamin Franklin theorized in his paper Aurora Borealis, Suppositions and Conjectures towards forming an Hypothesis for its Explanation that an aurora was caused by a concentration of electrical charge in the polar regions intensified by the snow and moisture in the air:[90][91][92]

May not then the great quantity of electricity brought into the polar regions by the clouds, which are condens'd there, and fall in snow, which electricity would enter the earth, but cannot penetrate the ice; may it not, I say (as a bottle overcharged) break thro' that low atmosphere and run along in the vacuum over the air towards the equator, diverging as the degrees of longitude enlarge, strongly visible where densest, and becoming less visible as it more diverges; till it finds a passage to the earth in more temperate climates, or is mingled with the upper air?

Observations of the rhythmic movement of compass needles due to the influence of an aurora were confirmed in the Swedish city of Uppsala by Anders Celsius and Olof Hiorter. In 1741, Hiorter was able to link large magnetic fluctuations with an aurora being observed overhead. This evidence helped to support their theory that 'magnetic storms' are responsible for such compass fluctuations.[93]
Church's 1865 painting Aurora Borealis

A variety of Native American myths surround the spectacle. The European explorer Samuel Hearne traveled with Chipewyan Dene in 1771 and recorded their views on the ed-thin ('caribou'). According to Hearne, the Dene people saw the resemblance between an aurora and the sparks produced when caribou fur is stroked. They believed that the lights were the spirits of their departed friends dancing in the sky, and when they shone brightly it meant that their deceased friends were very happy.[94]

During the night after the Battle of Fredericksburg, an aurora was seen from the battlefield. The Confederate Army took this as a sign that God was on their side, as the lights were rarely seen so far south. The painting Aurora Borealis by Frederic Edwin Church is widely interpreted to represent the conflict of the American Civil War.[95]

A mid 19th-century British source says auroras were a rare occurrence before the 18th century.[96] It quotes Halley as saying that before the aurora of 1716, no such phenomenon had been recorded for more than 80 years, and none of any consequence since 1574. It says no appearance is recorded in the Transactions of the French Academy of Sciences between 1666 and 1716; and that one aurora recorded in Berlin Miscellany for 1797 was called a very rare event. One observed in 1723 at Bologna was stated to be the first ever seen there. Celsius (1733) states the oldest residents of Uppsala thought the phenomenon a great rarity before 1716. The period between approximately 1645 and 1715 corresponds to the Maunder minimum in sunspot activity.

In Robert W. Service's satirical poem "The Ballad of the Northern Lights" (1908), a Yukon prospector discovers that the aurora is the glow from a radium mine. He stakes his claim, then goes to town looking for investors.

In the early 1900s, the Norwegian scientist Kristian Birkeland laid the foundation[colloquialism] for current understanding of geomagnetism and polar auroras.

In Sami mythology, the northern lights are caused by the deceased who bled to death cutting themselves, their blood spilling on the sky. Many aboriginal peoples of northern Eurasia and North America share similar beliefs of northern lights being the blood of the deceased, some believing they are caused by dead warriors' blood spraying on the sky as they engage in playing games, riding horses or having fun in some other way.



The discovery of a 1770 Japanese diary in 2017 depicting auroras above the ancient Japanese capital of Kyoto suggested that the storm may have been 7% larger than the Carrington event, which affected telegraph networks.[71][72]

The auroras that resulted from the "great geomagnetic storm" on both 28 August and 2 September 1859, however, are thought to be the most spectacular in recent recorded history. In a paper to the Royal Society on 21 November 1861, Balfour Stewart described both auroral events as documented by a self-recording magnetograph at the Kew Observatory and established the connection between the 2 September 1859 auroral storm and the Carrington–Hodgson flare event when he observed that "It is not impossible to suppose that in this case our luminary was taken in the act."[73] The second auroral event, which occurred on 2 September 1859, was a result of the (unseen) coronal mass ejection associated with the exceptionally intense Carrington–Hodgson white light solar flare on 1 September 1859. This event produced auroras so widespread and extraordinarily bright that they were seen and reported in published scientific measurements, ship logs, and newspapers throughout the United States, Europe, Japan, and Australia. It was reported by The New York Times that in Boston on Friday 2 September 1859 the aurora was "so brilliant that at about one o'clock ordinary print could be read by the light".[74] One o'clock EST time on Friday 2 September would have been 6:00 GMT; the self-recording magnetograph at the Kew Observatory was recording the geomagnetic storm, which was then one hour old, at its full intensity. Between 1859 and 1862, Elias Loomis published a series of nine papers on the Great Auroral Exhibition of 1859 in the American Journal of Science where he collected worldwide reports of the auroral event.[10]

That aurora is thought to have been produced by one of the most intense coronal mass ejections in history. It is also notable for the fact that it is the first time where the phenomena of auroral activity and electricity were unambiguously linked. This insight was made possible not only due to scientific magnetometer measurements of the era, but also as a result of a significant portion of the 125,000 miles (201,000 km) of telegraph lines then in service being significantly disrupted for many hours throughout the storm. Some telegraph lines, however, seem to have been of the appropriate length and orientation to produce a sufficient geomagnetically induced current from the electromagnetic field to allow for continued communication with the telegraph operator power supplies switched off.[75] The following conversation occurred between two operators of the American Telegraph Line between Boston and Portland, Maine, on the night of 2 September 1859 and reported in the Boston Traveler:

Boston operator (to Portland operator): "Please cut off your battery [power source] entirely for fifteen minutes."
Portland operator: "Will do so. It is now disconnected."
Boston: "Mine is disconnected, and we are working with the auroral current. How do you receive my writing?"
Portland: "Better than with our batteries on. – Current comes and goes gradually."
Boston: "My current is very strong at times, and we can work better without the batteries, as the aurora seems to neutralize and augment our batteries alternately, making current too strong at times for our relay magnets. Suppose we work without batteries while we are affected by this trouble."
Portland: "Very well. Shall I go ahead with business?"
Boston: "Yes. Go ahead."

The conversation was carried on for around two hours using no battery power at all and working solely with the current induced by the aurora, and it was said that this was the first time on record that more than a word or two was transmitted in such manner.[74] Such events led to the general conclusion that

The effect of the Aurora on the electric telegraph is generally to increase or diminish the electric current generated in working the wires. Sometimes it entirely neutralizes them, so that, in effect, no fluid [current] is discoverable in them. The aurora borealis seems to be composed of a mass of electric matter, resembling in every respect, that generated by the electric galvanic battery. The currents from it change coming on the wires, and then disappear: the mass of the aurora rolls from the horizon to the zenith.