Imagine that you are outside on a clear summer’s night, when all of a sudden a flash catches your eye. You whirl around in bewilderment as the black night sky flashes and dances with a whirling array of colors. The northern horizon is draped with an iridescent green, deep blues, sharp violets, scarlet reds, and bright oranges and yellows. You stand awestruck as the colors descend, like a melting rainbow, across the sky. Then, as quickly as they appeared, they vanish without a trace. This natural phenomenon is known as aurora borealis, or the northern lights, or better known as the dancing lights. Aurora Borealis is one of the most exotic and difficult concepts in astronomy. The colours of aurora borealis are fomed by the collision of gas particles in the Earth’s atmosphere with charged electrons from the sun’s atmosphere. So, today I will inform you about the different types of gas particles that are involved in the production of the colours of aurora borealis. I obtained the all the information about Aurora Borealis from the book entitled The Amazing Northern Lights authored by Syun-Ichi Akasofu. First of all, the big player in the formation of lights of the aurora borealis is oxygen. Oxygen is responsible for the vivid green light and also for a deep brownish red light. The emission of the deep brownish red light occurs at high altitudes of the aurora. At high altitudes, the earth’s atmosphere contains a greater percentage of atomic oxygen and is very thin like a hard vacuum giving the atoms ample opportunity to emit red light since the collisions between atoms happen only about every 7 seconds. This atomic oxygen emits red light at a wavelength of 630.0 nm. At this wavelength, our eyes are of lower sensitivity, making this color visible only under some circumstances with more intense solar activity. As the altitude gets lowered, the percentage of oxygen gets reduced and the collisions between the oxygen particles become more frequent resulting in emission of green lights at a wavelength of 557.7 nm. Besides oxygen, molecular nitrogen plays its role as well in the formation of the dancing colours of aurora borealis. At very low altitude, the density of molecules does not permit oxygen to emit light due to rapid decrease of concentration of atomic oxygen. Therefore, molecular nitrogen takes over in the emission of the lights whereby the collisions of the nitrogen particles result in purple and blue lights emissions at a wavelength of 428 nm. Finally, there are also other minor gases in the atmosphere that are responsible in the emission of light. These gases are hydrogen and helium that emit blue and purple lights respectively. Their wavelengths are outside of the range of human vision or else too faint to see. Although our eyes are unable to see all of these colors, photographic film and digital cameras often record a wider range of hues. As I have mentioned previously in the introduction, Aurora Borealis is one of the most exotic and difficult concepts in astronomy. Importantly, variation in the emission the lights of the Aurora Borealis is influenced by the collision of different gas particles in the Earth’s atmosphere with charged electrons from the sun’s atmosphere. To sum up, it is very crucial for us to know about Aurora Borealis, because it leads to understanding the physics of the sun, the earth and the atmosphere.