Photo: Moon Picture Northern Lights Hudson Bay Manitoba Canada

A bright full moon casts beams of light over Hudson Bay in Manitoba, Canada while the Northern Lights stream across the sky. A beautiful scene on a clear starry night in the town of Churchill.

Billowing and streaming across the sky, visable on clear starry nights, the northern lights are a phenomenon generated by the reaction of solar particles as they flow past the Earth - channeled by the earth's geomagnetic field. An added bonus is to see the northern lights during a full moon on a starry night especially over a large body of water such as Hudson Bay.

The northern lights (aka Aurora borealis) constantly change intensity and while sometimes they appear as a faint stream in the sky to begin with, they can quickly turn into a chaotic mass of swaying lights which fill the sky.

It can be difficult to photograph the northern lights with a full moon - normally the darker the sky the better the lights appear. But on this wild night of activity they did a good job of outshining the moon which hung over Hudson Bay, a scene watched from the town of Churchill in Manitoba - Canada's polar bear capital.

Northern Lights, Aurora borealis, above Hudson Bay and the town of Churchill with a bright moon, Manitoba, Canada.