One of the major changes we’ve made since last year’s expedition is the extension of our imaging diagnostic from a single all-sky camera + magnetometer to an improved suite of multiple, individually-deployable observation units. The benefits of this new instrument array are manyfold. First, production of several units in parallel has refined the design and…
Month: January 2025
Week 1 Observation Report
We have been here in Fairbanks for a week now and are fully nocturnal. After the getting our equipment tested and working out a few kinks, we started to deploy our cameras around the greater Fairbanks area, starting with one of the sites we observed at last year – Harding Lake. Monday night, we left…
First Magnetometer Test
We’ve had our first round of data from the magnetometers on four different allsky units from the night of 01-18 into 01-19. We weren’t able to see any aurora because of cloud cover, but we were curious to see if there were any correlations between the different the data signals. Here’s a sneak peak at…
First Camera Test
The cameras have seen their first onsite camera test at our home base here in Fairbanks. We put out four cameras around the outside of our accommodations here to see how well they held their internal temperature and to test the consistency of time syncing across the different camera units. We were very pleased to…
Landed in Alaska
The team has landed Alaska!!!!! All of us have made it to our new home outside of Fairbanks with our cameras, radios, and a muon detector as well as some standard EOS R cameras to keep track of our adventures! All except for one box of hardware got to Fairbanks without issue. One box had…
Allsky Camera Design
With the trip coming up in less than a week, we’ve finalized our designs for the diagnostics that we are bringing on the trip and are just finishing up the assembly. One of our core missions is to deploy a grid of allsky cameras with the aim of gathering enough information to make a 3D…