Dancing Spirits

Magical lights of Aurora Borealis appear over a traditional Sami village in Lapland, northern Sweden. The scenes of the sequence are each 2 minutes apart. The photos are panoramic projection of a fisheye lens, covering a large area of the sky.

Click on the second photo to see a larger view of the middle image when the aurora becomes most spooky! There is a deep connection between people of the far north and these majestic lights. Sami people in Lapland traditionally believed that the northern lights were the energies of the souls of the departed. Some Eskimos described aurora as the dancing spirits. Some Indians in the North America described it as a fire in the far north, a reminder from the creator of the Earth. Aurora is produced by the collision of high-energy charged particles, originated from the sun, with atoms and molecules of Earth’s atmosphere (at altitudes above 80 km). When aurora is very active as captured in this view its most beautiful form known as aurora corona appears near the zenith. Its form can appear to boil with motion, its colors can range across the entire spectrum and, when bright, it can easily cast a shadow.