After several days of cloudy weather and only tantalizing reflections off of distant clouds, we finally made our first successful observation of the aurora borealis on the evening of January 9th, 2024! Weather predictions showed that clouds were going to clear, and we set off for a local state park with a lake to see if we could get a clear view with less light pollution. Our home base for the trip was just a little south of Eielson Airforce Base, a substantial source of artificial light making observations more difficult.
Harding Lake State Recreation Area is about 14 miles south of our home base, and looked to provide an excellent observing site. After parking on a snow covered dirt road, it was only a short trek down to the lake bed where we were greeted by a beautiful auroral arc!
We quickly setup the All Sky camera and set it running, which you can see glowing in the foreground of the above photo. We were on our way to our first test with actual aurora! The radio team tried making some measurements with their NASA VLF kit but found the background noise from the nearby electrical wires, which oscillate at 60 cycles a second, was very strong and lead to no conclusive measurements of auroral radio signals. Nonetheless some spectacular views were had:
We even managed to get a photo of the whole group:
We headed back to base camp around 2:30am as clouds were starting to roll in, but left All Sky for another hour, with Tucker and John making a later run to retrieve it. You can find the first auroral time lapse from All Sky below:
Success! Unfortunately it appears that the clouds rolled in right during the period of highest activity, but we still got some great views and made a successful test. We had less success with the magnetometry data however, as the relay on our heater created magnet noise which we didn’t anticipate and greatly polluted the data. We’ll try again next time! Stay tuned for forthcoming observational reports.
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.