We looked at Landscape photographer Arild Heitmann, who captures the fleeting and rare natural phenomena, the northern lights or Aurora Borealis

What are the northern lights?

The northern lights (called the aurora borealis) and the southern lights (aurora australis) appear when tiny particles stream out from the Sun and hit Earth’s atmosphere. The particles give some of their energy to atoms and molecules of gases in the upper atmosphere. But the atoms and molecules cannot hold the energy. They quickly give it off as another kind of energy—the colors of light that we call the aurora. These lights occur most often around the North Pole and the South Pole because the incoming particles have an electric charge. As the particles arrive, Earth’s magnetic field guides them toward the poles.

Then we learned about atmospheric perspective in painting, and used watercolor and collage, and combined both ideas in these pieces.