We arrived in Fairbanks late in the night. We drove past North Pole and saw a moose near Moose Creek on our way to where we will be staying for the next two weeks – Salcha, AK.
We couldn’t help but immediately get out our cold weather gear and go and watch the sky.
A diffuse aurora to the Northeast! The conditions were somewhat hazy and the nearby air force base emits a fair bit of light pollution, but this is a good omen of things to come.
We’ve gathered rations for the expedition in Fairbanks the next day after loading up on reindeer meat at North Pole’s diner. Our good luck was tempered by a cloudy night. We took the opportunity to work out the bugs in our diagnostics (details to come in forthcoming posts). The days up here are short so we take advantage of the Sun. The sunsets here feel nearly as long as the day, and beautiful enough to make up for the long nights.
We’ve made contact with researchers at the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. We asked Austin Cohen, who develops citizen science magnetometer kits, for advice on our magnetometers. The auroral research program at the Institute is comprehensive: optical spectrometers and imagers, networks of ground based all-sky cameras and magnetometers, a 2 MW RADAR array for mapping auroral forms in 3D, and sounding rockets for making in situ measurements of particle distributions and magnetic field. While we won’t be launching any rockets, discussion with Professors Hampton and Delemear gave us insight in how to interpret the measurements we hoped to make and gave us some perspective on the greater geophysical context of the ionosphere and magnetosphere.
The temperature is dropping and the sky is clearing up. Tonight may grant us another view of the Aurora Borealis.
-Shon 1/10/24
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