The article studies lexical designations of the natural phenomenon of the Northern lights in scientific, literary, journalistic and advertising texts of German- and Russian-speaking authors. The purpose is to compare and contrast their implementation in German and Russian Arctic discourses. The study of semantics, syntactics and pragmatics of lexical designations of the phenomenon allows authors to comprehensively assess the views of German and Russian scientists, writers, poets, journalists, representatives of tourism and advertising business on the northern lights. A comparative study of lexical designations of the northern Lights in the focus of German and Russian Arctic discourses shows the similarity in the presentation of the lexical categories under consideration according to the existing universal (scientific) world picture and the differences in the implementation of lexical designations of northern lights, explained by the national world picture of the representatives of two compared linguistic cultures.