The Northland is fresh off a spectacular Northern Lights display over the weekend, leaving us with plenty of questions for Bob King, AKA AstroBob.

He explained to The Lift why we saw all those dazzling lights, “We had a huge sunspot group, and it was just kicking out flares. These huge ejections of material, called coronal mass ejections CMEs. We had five in a row CMEs. And they just kept coming.”

What causes the different colors?

“What it is, is all that material from the sun eventually gets funneled down and spirals down into the polar atmosphere- which then excited the atoms and the molecules. That green color- the primary color of the aurora- is from oxygen at about 75 miles high. Then that red color- that’s also oxygen- but that’s 150 miles high. So, you often see red on top green on the bottom. If you see blue, that’s another main constituent of our atmosphere, oxygen.”

“Sometimes they overlap and they produce purples and other colors.

What causes the motion?

“I asked a researcher two days ago and said, ‘What exactly is happening with that?’ There’s so much pumping. It’s primarily electrons from the sun that is causing that excitement. It’s just this constant of pumping of the sun at different rates. That causes that fluctuating and flickering of lights.“

What does the camera brighter colors than our eyes?

“To our eye, the colors are generally pale for the Northern Lights. That’s because eyes only see in the moment. The camera is bucket that takes a time exposure of the light, like second after second, it accumulates and becomes intensified. And they are real colors, they’re not fake. It’s just that camera is a better eye for us.“