![]() The proper name for the aurora of the southern hemisphere is the aurora australis. These particles stream out from the sun and normally are guided by the earth's magnetic field into the polar regions where they enter the atmosphere and make it glow. That glow is caused by the atoms and molecules being struck by charged particles, mostly electrons and protons, that originated on the sun. It is a glow given off by the atoms and molecules of which the atmosphere is composed. Instead, the aurora is an actual light source created in the high atmosphere. Misinformed by geography books written as late as fifty years ago, a surprising number of people still labor under the misconception that the aurora is sunlight glinting off the high atmosphere, off the polar icecap or off falling snow or ice crystals. Galileo's original error has propagated through nearly four centuries to the present time. He wrongly thought that the aurora is caused by sunlight reflecting from the high atmosphere. Galileo referenced the aurora as part of his arguments against the established idea that the earth was the center of the Universe. Therefore, his writings on the subject were appearing under the name of his student, Mario Guiducci. The early history of auroral terminology is somewhat clouded because, at the time, Galileo was already under duress from the Roman Inquisition and was not supposed to be writing on astronomical matters. Once the term aurora borealis was introduced, Galileo and others used it as the name for the Northern Lights. The term aurora borealis was first used by Galileo in 1619 to suggest the likeness of the northern lights to an early dawn in the northern sky, an appearance it sometimes has to those who live at low or intermediate latitudes in the northern hemisphere. In works of art Eos is represented as a young woman, usually winged, either walking fast with a youth in her arms or rising from the sea in a chariot drawn by winged horses sometimes, as the goddess who dispenses the dews of the morning, she has a pitcher in each hand.The Northern Lights and the aurora borealis are two names for the same thing. As a result, Tithonus grew ever older and weaker, but he could not die. Her most famous lover was the Trojan Tithonus, for whom she gained from Zeus the gift of immortality but forgot to ask for eternal youth. She bears in Homer’s works the epithet Rosy-Fingered.Įos was also represented as the lover of the hunter Orion and of the youthful hunter Cephalus, by whom she was the mother of Phaethon (not the same as the son of Helios). By the Titan Astraeus she was the mother of the winds Zephyrus, Notus, and Boreas, and of Hesperus (the Evening Star) and the other stars by Tithonus of Assyria she was the mother of Memnon, king of the Ethiopians, who was slain by Achilles at Troy. According to the Greek poet Hesiod’s Theogony, she was the daughter of the Titan Hyperion and the Titaness Theia and sister of Helios, the sun god, and Selene, the moon goddess.
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