(Above) © Bjorn Jorgensen, www.arcticphoto.no
Event: The Northern Lights performance, National Space Centre, Leicester, February 23 2010
Depending on which European theorists you listened to in the Middle Ages, the Northern Lights could have represented oncoming disease, plague, death, war or the breath of heavenly warriors.
French astronomer Pierre Gassendi named them aurora borealis – after the Roman Goddess of dawn and the Greek name for north wind – when he spotted them in 1621, and the luminous cosmic hues have lent themselves to Arctic myth and legend ever since.
Poet and performer Siobhan Logan has spent three years writing a book about the Lights. homepage.ntlworld.com/ siobhan.logan1
In a "unique celestial event" next month, experts will converge on the National Space Centre for an outbreak of poetry, prose and film as part of an arts programme inspired by the Lights, featuring the world’s first 3D film of their rays.
"I was interested in the myths indigenous Arctic people have created about the Northern Lights, but also what the scientists can tell us about the aurora," says poet and performer Siobhan Logan, who spent three years writing about the Lights before finally seeing them on a fjord in North Norway in October 2008. "It was the experience of a lifetime."
She teamed up with scientists and a reindeer herder for her Nordic expedition.
Red and green aurora in Fairbanks, Alaska. © Mila Zinkova
"For a writer, it was such an inspiring place," she reflects. "I came back with my head full of the creatures, characters and stories of the north."
Logan's trip was sponsored by a group of gamma geeks from the University of Leicester's Radio and Space Plasma Physics Groups.
Lovers of auroral science, they're presenting tales of Arctic folklore and some of the secrets of the Lights in a repeat of a show which sold out at London's Science Museum.
"Science only tells us of the mechanisms of the auroras," points out Dr Darren Wright, who'll be explaining a few theories as part of the event.
"Another language is required to express our reaction to the sight of flickering lights over frozen landscapes."
Alongside music from the Saami people of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia, a cinematic collaboration between award-winning film-maker Brian McClave and physicist George Milward will offer the world’s first stereoscopic video of the Lights, showing their structure and movement through 3D glasses.
Logan prosaically calls the film "a slip of green silk in the dark, a twist of smoke, an endlessly fluid, changing shape."
Starts 7.30pm. Admission free, entry by ticket only, email kr124@le.ac.uk or call 0116 252 3570 to book.
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