Aurora Australis – Southern Lights over Southern Lights

Some years ago while travelling through Tasmania near Hobart, my companions and I came across this magical vision. There was a profound silence, and this magnificent scene of greens, mauves and indigo, flickering though the night sky and reflecting back into the water. Auroras begin with a solar wind, a stream of electrically charge particles that flow from the sun when this wind interacts with atoms. In the earth’s magnetic field, energy is released in the form of photons, which appear to us a slight. Different atoms create different colours.