After our successful night of observations at Poker Flat Research Range the night before, we decided to return to the range again the next night to see if we could continue our observational success. A late wakeup from the night before lead to a late arrival at the range (nearly midnight!) so the aurora was already starting to show itself when we arrived. We quickly scrambled to setup our instruments, choosing to drop All Sky outside this time to free up the dome for some attempts to make measurements using our spectrometer. The radio team was also planning some more complex measurements of their own deploying their homemade loop antenna in the field to try and record radio emissions from the aurora. This would mark the first night that we attempted to observe with all three diagnostics we brought!
Setting up the radio antenna posed an interesting challenge, as the large wire antenna had to be mounted vertically to optimize its coupling to auroral emission. We decided that the easiest way to do this was to hang it in the near by trees, which turned out to be a challenging task in the pitch black snow-covered Alaskan night:
With the antenna setup in the trees, Skylar and Jacob took turns testing their Raspberry Pi based radio systems to see if they could hear or record anything interesting:
Skylar and Jacob’s radio systems are packaged in an old backgammon game case and a plastic Tupperware respectfully, which you can hopefully pick out in the images above! Like during observations at the lake, the radio team was greatly challenged by the strong background 60 Hz frequency generated by the electrical lines. Post processing is underway to see if anything can be extracted from the recordings made.
All Sky ran successfully for a third night! Here is the recorded time lapse of the night’s aurora:
If you look close, you can even see the Milky Way rotating through the sky!
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