Norway: Northern lights

Edmund Halley

Sir Edmund Halley (1656-1742) had seen almost everything. There was scarcely a known light phenomenon that this English astronomer had not observed in the sky, but he had never seen the northern lights and at the age of sixty he had almost given up hope. Halley had no reason to do this. On 6 March 1716, the sky flamed with light all over Central Europe, from Ireland in the west to Poland and Russia in the east.
The evolution of theories explaining the northern lights ran parallel with other advances in physics, astronomy and geophysics. Halley associated the northern lights with changes in the magnetic field and subsequent theories developed alongside theories about electricity.

Carl Stormer

It was a Norwegian, Carl Stormer (1874-1957) who finally found the answer. Stormer experimented with different kinds of lenses and photographic plates. In 1909 he succeeded in taking satisfactory photographs of the northern lights. Later observations and theories confirm the main content of Stormer's ideas. The northern lights occur when particles from the sun are cast into the earth's atmosphere and collide with atoms and molecules there.