rays, they were called jumping goats. Without such rays, they were called simply fire.
             In contrast, we find a sober and objective description of the northern lights in the nordic book Kongespeilet (The King's Mirror) written approximately 1230. Here the author writes:
             Otherwise it is the same with the northern lights as with anything else we know nothing about, that wise men put forward ideas and simple guesswork, and belive that what is most common and probabale.
             He then puts forwards several theories, some of which are based upon the fact that the northern lights were then common over Greenland, but rare over Norway. For example,
             Some people say that when the sun is under the horizon at night, some rays of light reach up to the skies over Greenland, a landmass so close to the edge of the earth that the earth's curvature is which hides the sun must be less there.
             Even today there are many different theories about the northern lights. Some say that if you wave to them, they will increase in activity or even reach down and catch you. Or that if you look at them you will damage your eyes. One visitor to the Planetarium in Tromsx wondered how they came right down to the ground. He had seen it happen several times. Another wanted an explanation for the crackling noises he could hear when the northern lights were strong. One common notion is that the lights only appear when it is cold. They are, of course unaffected by the weather, but to see them, it should be dark and the sky cloudless. Under such conditions it is generally cold in North Norway (See Fig. 4).
             Fig. 4. Northern lights photographed from a satellite.
             The Northern lights are poetry, they are nature's light show, and they are quantum leaps in the oxygen atom. They are elementary particle physics, superstition, mythology and fairy tales. The northern lights have filled people with wonder and inspired artists; they have frightened people to think that the end i...