After our visit to University of Alaska, Fairbanks on the 9th we were invited to join scientist and professor Don Hampton for a visit to Poker Flat Research Range, the only university owned rocket range in the world. This site is frequently used by NASA to launch sub-orbital sounding rockets to study the aurora and adjoining atmospheric science. We were granted permission to observe on the site from the T. Neil Davis Operations Center, where many of the ground based measurements used to support launches are based:
Most useful for our observational goals, the facility includes several plastic domes which allow for scientific instruments to view the entire night sky from the comfort of an indoor space:
We setup our All Sky camera in one of these domes, this time without the insulating enclosure since the system would be indoors:
With All Sky running, we headed outside for an unimpeded view of the aurora with our own eyes. To say we got a spectacular show would be an understatement! Long quiescent arcs began to form and waver in the northern sky, and slowly began to progress south. Eventually the arcs grew in intensity, and then broke up, forming more complex and diffuse structures. You can track the whole progression of the evening from the All Sky video we took:
The time lapse was a great success except for one small problem: the lights from the camera, Raspberry Pi, and analog to digital converter reflected off of the observation dome! These result in the unfortunate patches of color you see around the middle of the image in the time lapse video. A valuable lesson learned! The bigger dome makes it easier for reflections to get into the camera, hence why we never saw them on our previous videos made using the small domes we built onto All Sky. Nonetheless we saw some spectacular aurora! Here are some other pictures from our observations:
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