On a very basic level the northern lights are quite simple to explain. The lights come at night when the sky is dark. It’s like a celestial ballet of light dancing across the night sky, with a colour palette (green, pink, violet) reminiscent of a really cool fashion show from the 1980s. To the locals in Northern Norway, the northern lights are a part of life. In this area the aurora borealis has been, and still is, a fertile source for art, mythology and legends.
In Lofoten we live beneath the Auroral Oval. This is a belt of light that encircles the geomagnetic poles, and here your have the best chance of seeing the Northern Lights.
The green colour, the most common in the northern lights, occurs when particles from the sun collide with a lot of oxygen.
The yellow/green light is formed between 120-180 km up in the atmosphere.
Control of the aurora particles from the Earth's magnetic field determines where on Earth we will get the aurora.
The Northern Lights oval runs mainly along the coast from Lofoten to the North Cape, over Vesterålen, Senja, Tromsø and Alta.
Here, there is actually the most northern lights activity in the world.
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