Are there auroral displays around the South Pole? How are they different?
Yes, there are, and they are just like the northern aurora. On Earth, where the magnetic dipole field guides the energetic particles that make the aurora, we get an oval-shaped ring of aurora around the magnetic poles. The particles don’t care whether they are going south or north along the magnetic field, so the aurora on the two hemispheres is the same. Of course, when the northern hemisphere has winter and the darkness that’s needed to see the aurora, the south pole has bright daylight all day long. So it is only during fall and spring that a person in Antarctica could get on the phone to call someone in Alaska to find out if the aurora looks the same. When you do take pictures of the aurora at these two places, the large spirals that we sometimes see in the aurora will often look like mirror images of each other.
