Man Drives Over 600 Miles to Capture 'Magical' Rare Red Northern Lights

A mesmerizing video of red auroras in Norway has captivated users on social media.

Lorenzo Mirandola captured the rare northern lights view in the vibrant Norwegian city of Bodø, just north of the Arctic Circle. The 31-year-old shared the video on Instagram on April 12 from his account @lorenzmira_lapland.

Mirandola, who is based in Rovaniemi in Finland, told Newsweek: "I am an aurora hunter, and I do that for passion and work, taking people every night, when possible, to see the northern lights in Finland, Sweden and Norway."

The clip begins with a show of both red and green northern lights across a night sky before the red aurora gradually becomes more vivid and dominates the sky.

A caption shared with the post says: "From one of the most magical nights of the last season. Red northern lights."

Mirandola told Newsweek: "The video is timelapse [footage] from December 1, when a big coronal mass ejection arrived from the sun. I drove 1,000 km (around 620 miles) from Finland to Norway to be able to see this show."

The Northern Lights and the Rare Red Aurora

The Northern Lights, also known as the Aurora Borealis, are formed from electrons colliding with the upper reaches of Earth's atmosphere.

The U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) explains that in these collisions, "the electrons transfer their energy to the atmosphere thus exciting the atoms and molecules to higher energy states. When they relax back down to lower energy states, they release their energy in the form of light..."

A coronal mass ejection (CME) is a solar event that can be described as "a billion tons of plasma ejected from the sun, traveling at a million miles per hour," says the NOAA.

"When a CME arrives at Earth, it can produce some of the biggest geomagnetic storms and thus, some of the brightest and most active auroras that extend furthest toward the equator," the NOAA adds.

The different colors of the northern lights stem from the different heights in the atmosphere at which they occur due to the varying amount of time that an atom or molecule is in an excited state. Green auroras are most common and usually occur from around 80 to 250 miles above the surface of Earth, while red auroras are rarer, occurring at higher altitudes from above 186 miles.

"Auroral scientists do not yet fully understand the cause of pure red aurora. They know it is associated with intense solar activity and heating of the upper atmosphere from a large influx of low-energy electrons; they have not yet explained the mechanism producing this occurrence," said an article from the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

According to the institute, one of the most impressive red aurora displays in North America occurred in February 1958, and it was seen in California and Florida.

"In Alaska, the show lasted nearly all night. The red light in the sky was so intense it made the snow on the ground gleam red," the institute said.

'So Surreal'

Mirandola told Newsweek, "I love auroras. They are my passion and every aurora is different and beautiful. Red auroras are usually mostly visible during solar max because they are mostly visible due to the arrival of CME.

"Often, the red color is visible with the camera but not with naked eyes. When it is as strong as you see in the video is perfectly visible also with naked eyes, but it is quite rare to have it so strong," he added.

Users on Instagram were blown away by the footage.

"It looks so surreal!! What a beautiful sight to see," said @jody.lasala.

User @moonshadow9021 simply wrote "Stunning," while @janine.bader50 said it was "Spectacular."

"So many colors, fantastic," @sunnygirl2908 commented.

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