The book I decided to read for the assignment is "The Northern Lights" written by Lucy Jago. This book by Jago details the true story of Kristian Birkeland, the man who put his life aside to figure out the secrets of the Northern Lights. .
This book describes the Journey of six men who climbed to the tallest peaks of Haldde Mountain to record and study the aurora borealis. These Six men were; Clement Isaakson Haetta, Kristian Olaf Birkeland, Bjorn Helland-Hansen, Elisar Boye, Kristoffer Knudsen, and Sem Saeland. While spending six months during the fierce winter, the six men recorded data off of state of the art instruments like the anemometer, which was used to record wind speeds. Also used was a Barometer to tell whether the air pressure changed during the aurora shows, while the Hygrometer measured the air humidity. The most important instrument used though was the magnetometers, which was used to measure changes in the strength and direction and the Earth's magnetic field. Birkeland hoped that these instruments would give them answers to many questions asked about the bright lights. Some questions they were hoping to answer were; are the lights accompanied by a crackling noise, could the lights make hair stand on end, did they touch the ground, did they occur during daytime?.
By the end of the winter Birkeland was convinced that his theory, "that the force disturbing the magnetic field came directly from the sun in narrow beams of electrically charged particles called cathode rays," was correct. A British scientist once showed "that cathode rays consisted of high velocity streams of negatively charged particles: electrons." Birkeland was convinced that the Sun put out similar rays and that "these particles hit the magnetic field of the earth and followed the field lines down toward the poles, where they struck atoms in the atmosphere and the energy created by the collisions was emitted as light.