The Rosicrucian Issue 77, August 2019
1. Pushing Onward
2. Communion with the Northern Lights
3. In Memoriam
4. An Introduction to the Study of the Endocrine Glands
5. The Breath of Life
6. Your Body's Immunity to Disease
7. Cycles and Vibrations
8. Phases of the Sun – A Northern Hemisphere Perspective
9. Emir Abdelkader
10. Inner Healing
11. A Code of Mystical Functions
12. Masters of the Threshold
And the skies of night were alive with light, with a throbbing, thrilling flame; Amber and rose and violet, opal and gold it came. It swept the sky like a giant scythe, it quivered back to a wedge; Argently bright, it cleft the night with a wavy golden edge. — “The Ballad of the Northern Lights” by Robert William Service (1874-1958)
Our cover photo was taken by astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) of the aurora australis, or “southern lights,” while passing over the Indian Ocean on September 17, 2011. Solar panels and other sections of the ISS fill some of the upper right side of the photograph.
Auroras are a spectacular sign that our planet is electrically and magnetically connected to the Sun. These light shows are provoked by energy from the Sun and fuelled by electrically charged particles trapped in Earth’s magnetic field, or magnetosphere. In this case, the space around Earth was stirred up by an explosion of hot, ionized gas from the Sun—a coronal mass ejection—that left the Sun on September 14, 2011.
Fast-moving electrons collide with Earth’s upper atmosphere, transferring their energy to oxygen and nitrogen molecules and making them chemically “excited.” As the gases return to their normal state, they emit photons, small bursts of energy in the form of light. The colour of light reflects the type of molecules releasing it; oxygen molecules and atoms tend to glow green, white or red, while nitrogen tends to be blue or purple.