Northern Lights and Midnight Sun This is the land of wilderness. This is the birthplace of Aurora and Midnight Sun. These are the wonders that God bestowed upon humanity. Come to Yukon! We, Wilderness Lake Recreation Centre Inc., will take you to witness the dance of Aurora in the winter and bask in the midnight sun in the summer.

Aurora An aurora, also known as a polar light, is a dazzling spectacle of natural light in the sky, mainly seen in the high latitude regions of the Arctic and Antarctic. Auroras are created when the solar wind disturbs the magnetosphere enough to make charged particles from both sources, such as electrons and protons, rain down into the upper atmosphere, where they lose their energy. The resulting light emission varies in colour and shape, depending on the type and speed of the particles. The aurora usually appears in bands around both poles, but its form can change depending on how much the particles are accelerated. Some particles, especially protons, can also produce optical emissions by colliding with hydrogen atoms in the atmosphere.

Auroras typically occur in a ring-shaped area called the auroral zone, which is about 3° to 6° wide in latitude and 10° to 20° away from the geomagnetic poles at any time or place, most visible at night against a dark sky. A part of the auroral zone that shows an aurora at a given moment is called the auroral oval, a band that shifts towards the night side of the Earth. The positions of the auroral ovals change every day and can be found online.

In the northern hemisphere, this phenomenon is known as the aurora borealis (or the northern lights), named after Aurora, the Roman goddess of dawn, and Boreas, the Greek name for the north wind, by Galileo in 1619. Auroras that happen within the auroral oval can be seen directly above, but from further away they light up the horizon near the pole with a greenish glow, or sometimes a faint red, as if a strange sun were rising from there.

Source: Adapted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora

Midnight Sun The midnight sun is a natural phenomenon that happens in the summer months in places north of the Arctic Circle or south of the Antarctic Circle, when the sun stays visible at midnight. Around the summer solstice (around 21 June in the Northern Hemisphere and 22 December in the Southern Hemisphere) the sun can be seen for 24 hours straight, if the weather is clear. The number of days per year with possible midnight sun grows as one gets closer to either pole. Although roughly marked by the polar circles, in reality the midnight sun can be observed as far as 55 miles (90 km) beyond them, as explained below, and the exact locations of where it can be seen depend on the terrain and vary slightly every year.

There are no permanent or self-sufficient human settlements south of the Antarctic Circle, only research stations, so only those countries and territories that are crossed by the Arctic Circle have populations that experience the midnight sun: Canada (Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut), Greenland, Iceland, Finland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States (Alaska). A quarter of Finland’s land lies north of the Arctic Circle, and at its northernmost point there is no sunset for 60 days during summer. In Svalbard, Norway, Europe’s northernmost inhabited area, there is no sunset from around 19 April to 23 August. The most extreme places are the poles, where half of the year is one continuous day.

Source: Adapted from Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_sun