I feel rather mean spirited about what I'm about to say, but it needs to be said nonetheless: the Northern Lights are a myth. I don't mean they are mythologised by the peoples of the north, which they are, producing colourful creationist stories that have long fuelled campfire sessions; I mean, they don't exist. Or at least they rarely exist in the way travellers imagine and, more pertinently, to the gloriously colourful extent splashed across holiday brochures.
One might argue that most travellers are used to viewing tour operators' postcard-perfect images with a big pinch of propagandist salt. But it's not just the brochures that pile on the pictorial superlatives. It's the photographs themselves. In the case of the Northern Lights, the camera really does lie – no filter, no Photoshop.
I'm just back from Lapland, where I saw what's termed a "faint display" from the aurora. In several trips to the boreal north this has only ever been my experience: a white-green ghostly sky that, while undeniably beautiful, bore no resemblance to the vivid green pyrotechnics captured on my camera's lens. Standing next to me on a frozen Finnish lake, eyeballing the lights through a viewfinder, my eight-year-old daughter didn't believe she was seeing the same thing that wobbled faintly in the heavens above her. But it was. Same sky, different eye.