With the weather increasingly on the mend and our short but successful observations the night before, we decided to head back to Poker Flat Research Range in the hopes of repeating our previous success. We again decided to drop All Sky outside, leaving interior observing space to the spectro-binoculars. Skylar came equipped with both of her radio systems, which she planned to deploy simultaneously. We arrived to find a pretty bright moon, but nice and clear skies. We immediately noticed that the East-West auroral arcs that we normally observe at Poker were moving much farther south than usual – a good sign that something big was going to happen. And sure enough, not long after midnight, the skies absolutely erupted in the brightest, most active aurora we have seen yet! The show was absolutely spectacular but did not last long. There was then a sort of “quiet” period where the aurora remained overhead but was not highly organized and was substantially dimmer. It eventually coalesced back into an arc, but this one was nearly directly overhead and immensely stable, with a “flowing” appearance. You can see it all on the captured All Sky video:
Unfortunately we had issues with condensation and ice forming on the All Sky dome, but we nonetheless got a spectacular video! The bright white object you see traverse the sky is the moon. We of course took lots of photos, especially of the sub storm:
We collected lots of data that still need to be analyzed (magnetometry and spectroscopy data most notably) so stay tuned for more in-depth analysis of the events we witnessed!
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.