Readers Digest Australia Sampler 2022

The Aurora Village viewing area and its collection of teepees news by saying that auroral sound was “scientifically unreasonable”, but admitted that he has heard it, too. To Indigenous communities, the northern lights are familiar but worthy of respect. Many Inuit people in the Arctic share a myth of the lights, which they call aqsarniit . They are said to be the spirits of the dead playing football, usually with a walrus skull. The aqsar- niit were traditionally considered dan- gerous because they move so quickly and heedlessly in their pursuit. It’s been said that the Sámi people, of Fennoscandia, believed that the au- rora, called guovsahasat , could swoop down and burn a person. Women would cover their heads to keep the aurora out of their hair, people kept silent to avoid irritating it, and bells were taken off reindeer when the au- rora was bright. Early European and Asian observers thought the aurora was a heavenly battle, a line of enor- mous candles, or a fissure in the sky. Edmond Halley – the early 18th cen- tury astronomer of Halley’s Comet fame – theorised it was the result of water vapour somehow igniting the atmosphere after being released from fissures on the Earth’s surface. The aurora is only a few hundred metres thick, since it follows the lines of our planet’s magnetic field. But it is also immense, hundreds of kilo- metres wide and high, and it occurs between 100 and 1000 kilometres above the Earth, in the ionosphere. The International Space Station flies through this range. The lights cannot form lower in our skies because the energy of colliding particles is lost as the atmosphere becomes denser. Each evening at Blachford Lake, we PHOTO: KEN PHUNG/SHUTTERSTOCK 10 May 2022 READER’S DIGEST