St. Paddy's Aurora

Did you know that in Finland, the legend goes that a fox paints the aurora with its tail? The finnish word for aurora translates to "fire of the fox" and of course it sounds adorable (as all finnish words do). These are the fun things you can learn when the aurora goes crazy and everyone is talking about it. I even overheard a conversation on the train about the northern lights. Being able to overhear and understand Swedish conversations is probably one of my biggest accomplishments of the past year. It is funny to think about what sorts of small things keep you from feeling isolated.

ramble ramble photos!

Aurora article

I wrote an article for the Aurorasaurus blog? Did you hear? Well, really it is just a blog post, but I think it is more official than my regular posting. So clearly I can call it an article, right?

7QT: Are these starting to sound the same each week?

1. The Sushi Bazooka, alternately titled The Sushezi.

I don't have this or want this; I just think it is amazing.

2. I love the public library so much. Normally I like to plan out what books I'll look for before I actually go to the library. This way I can check off a book that I've actually been meaning to read. Greg often likes to just browse to see if he finds anything that looks interesting. Every time this happens, I end up finding books too (or sometimes I find books and he doesn't). For example, did you know that Lauren Graham (of Gilmore Girls fame) wrote a book?

The other great thing about library books is that I'm more motivated to actually read them. I don't like to leave a book unfinished, and I am not a huge fan of renewing the books (because obviously I pick the best books and other people are surely waiting for them). Also, I like to have the book I'm reading, plus one on hand for when I finish. Sometimes, I'll get a surprise email saying a book I was on the reserve list for is available for me, and those you have to pick up within a limited time and you do not have the option to renew. All this adds up to reading rates that I am quite satisfied with:) Thank you, Library.

3. I feel like I write about Anki, the electronic flash-card program, quite often. A thing I really like about it is that you can look at a nice display of graphs and stats. Normally I just look at the stats of individual 'decks' but the other day I checked out the stats for all the 'decks' and there were some interesting things there. I found out that on average, I am studying Swedish vocabulary for about an hour each week, and normally this is done with 20 minute sessions on three days of the week.

In my mind I have this goal of studying vocabulary for twice this amount of time. I really wish I would only skip one day of studying per week, but that never seems to work out for me. It is sort of a mixed bag of feeling glad that I am studying vocabulary for so much time (compared to the nothingness of the majority of my time living here) and feeling disappointed for not doing more. I can really tell that it makes a big difference in my Swedish skills, but somehow that doesn't give me the motivation to do more.

4. In Swedish you can sing an alphabet song to the same tune as the english alphabet song. There are three extra vowels at the end of the Swedish alphabet, so once you get the 'lmnop' section, there are really no pauses and you also never say 'and' before the last letter. Also, people of my generation do not include w in the Swedish alphabet, but when a 3 year old sings it, he includes it. Just some Swedish alphabet facts for your friday.

5. Here is a fun fact about the northern lights: If you are seeing a really faint glow in the sky, near the northern horizon, and you are wondering if you are seeing aurora or clouds, check to see if you can see a star through it. You can see stars through aurora, but clouds block out the stars.

6. The northern lights are called norrsken in Swedish, which sounds like norr-when but you have to imagine the person pronouncing the when like a person who has a strong h sound when they pronounce the word white. Norr means north, and the only other place I've seen 'sken' is in the word solsken, which means sunshine (sol = sun).

7. Folk dance tomorrow, and folk dance next saturday too! It feels lucky to be me!

__________________________

The End and The Link-up!

7QT: magic and aurora

1. I'm learning to play the Swedish National Anthem on the harmonica. Or maybe it is safer to say that on Sunday afternoon I spent several hours playing harmonica for fun, and much of that time was dedicated to playing (or sometimes just singing) the Swedish National Anthem. I was going to attempt to memorize it, but I only had the first two lines down by the time the request came for harmonica practice to be over.

2. My new favorite thing is to translate what Swedish people are saying for Greg. So, at the folk music festival over the weekend I was translating all sorts of great stuff for him. The first thing was how a guy was talking about a dog and a sandwich and then he was going to play a last song from Orsa. Then there was another thing a woman was saying about how a) they had a sister school or b) her sister is at the school. And also she said 145. I am clearly making a lot of progress with this whole language learning thing.

3. "Magic can end up being rather uninteresting." That is the essence of a comment made at lunch earlier this week after we were talking about how so many movies take liberties and get 'the physics' wrong and whatnot. For example, how long can you find something enjoyable until it just starts to upset you because of how wrong it is? Then that topic sort of morphed into fantasy/magic, and that is when someone made the comment I quoted above, in reference to taking extreme liberties without limits. It was a seemingly simple thing to say, but it sort of hit me in a hard way. It immediately made me think that this is a value of organized religion as opposed to the "I'm spiritual but not religious" mentality.

4. Aurora! The sun has been really active* lately, so I've been waiting and waiting for the clouds to clear out. On Wednesday night clear skies were predicted, so I checked the space weather** and things seemed moderately okay. So after I got home from my dance course, Greg and I headed out with camera and tripod in tow. As an aside, it was really nice to be able to use the tripod for its true purpose instead of just a long-handled spider-killer. And if you are super interested, here are all the other posts I've written and tagged 'aurora'.



Also, to avoid any confusion, the aurora in the above photo is the long green stripy bit very close to the horizon. Those little crosses near the center-top of the photo are an artifact of the lights from the building. Sort of like sun-flare, only building-flare?

5. Oh, and there is a book at the library about aurora legends that I saw while browsing that I really want to get. I believe it was Northern Lights: Legends, Sagas and Folk Tales. I'm glad it has a really high rating, should be an interesting read:)

6. Yesterday we treated ourselves to some Reese's peanut butter cups in celebration of the Halloween we didn't actually celebrate. And while I was browsing the American section of the grocery store, I couldn't help but to put some mac & cheese in our basket. I had been resisting that purchase for quite awhile. The brand of the mac & cheese is Mississippi Belle, which I had never seen and might only be available in places that are not the US? When I saw this item on a webpage I laughed a LOT when I noticed that others who had purchased it had also purchased Bette Crocker Rainbow Chip cake and peanut butter m&m's. These people really get me.

7. I'm out of things, but don't want to save this for next week, so let's just call it the end and link to the link-up. Thanks for reading:)

* I may have really low standards, what with the whole - doing my phd on auroral studies during solar minimum - thing.

** I once wrote some posts on predicting aurora, but they are rather out of date now. The two main things I looked at yesterday were data from the ACE satellite and from the GOES satellites, and I think what I wrote still mostly applies. Anything I said about Stereo satellites is no longer relevant, because their location has changed quite a bit. I am also really impressed with myself, because those two links contain current plots... not sure how I found out where to get those, but go me!

Aurora stories

One thing that is great about studying the aurora is the stories people share about their experiences seeing the northern lights. Last night at the contra dance I must have been feeling particularly chatty, because I ended up getting stories from two (or more maybe?) people.

First was from Annie, who grew up in Minnesota, and therefore had some good experience with seeing aurora. She told me about the best aurora she had ever seen which she described as totally white with no colors, and all pointing up to one point in the sky directly above them. It is good to have reminders that what I am studying is more than just plots and data. The aurora is both a fascinating science, but also an incredibly beautiful thing to behold.

The second story was from Ray, and this one was more along the comedy line than the wonderment line. The really funny thing was that he was telling me the story while we were dancing, so he'd say a small bit of his story, and then the dance would have us with neighbors, so the story would pause, but then we'd go back to our partners, and he'd give me the next bit. Very entertaining. Anyhow. So, his story was from the 70's when he was in college. He said he had a friend who was a pretty heavy drug user, but Ray was a pretty straight-laced kid. Well one night those two, along with some others, were out at the football field, and he looked up and saw this beautiful aurora. So he pointed it out to the others, and the drug-friend said "you see it too?!?!"

That cracked me up quite a bit. Mostly because I wasn't sure where the story was going, and the telling of it took so much longer because of how it kept getting broken up.

I'm glad I didn't have anyone tell me they've heard the aurora, or ask if it was true that you can hear it. The question is always posed in such a child-like manner with wonder, awe, and hope all over it. I just hate to burst that bubble.
(:

Predicting Aurora: Optics

So what better way of knowing if there is aurora than by looking at the optics! There are plenty of places to find data online, the one I check is run by some colleagues in Alaska, which can be found here. The site has some archived data, but is best for looking at real-time data (note that there won't be anything on the real-time pages if you look at them during daylight hours). Spend some time clicking around those different pages, at night, so you can see the different options. There are several different stations which are at different latitudes. If the aurora starts to move to lower latitudes there is a better chance that things will get very active.

Two of the main things you will see on this page are keograms (the rectangular ones) and all-sky images (the round ones). Let's talk about the all-sky images first, or ASI, as I'll probably continue to call them.

The ASI are probably easiest to understand, because they are pretty comparable to regular cameras. You can think of it as a regular camera that is viewing the entire sky. If you want a little more detail, imagine that you are lying on your back with your feet pointed to the North, and you are looking at the entire sky. The view of the entire sky that you see is the same projection that an ASI gives (so North is generally at the bottom of the frame, I apologize on behalf of the entire community). Some of the all-skies show white light (as in, what we would see with our eye, converted to black and white), and some show particular wavelengths (for example, 630.0 nm, which corresponds to the red aurora at higher altitudes).

The keograms are useful for knowing what the aurora has been doing over the past however many hours are plotted. One way of making a keogram is to take a slice of the all-sky image from the north to the south. Then you put a bunch of these slices together over time to show how the aurora has changed with time. Another option for the keogram (which is possibly more typical) is to use a Meridian Scanning Photometer, or MSP. An MSP is an optical device that measure photons (the light we see as aurora), but it generally doesn't use a lens like the all-sky does, so we don't actually call it a camera (hence "optical device"). The MSP, as the name implies, scans the meridian, so once again we are getting a slice of the sky from north to south, which is then plotted in sequence with time. I hope that makes sense to anyone who is not already familiar with a keogram.

For now this is all I have to write about predicting aurora, unless anyone has specific questions for me.

:) Thanks for playing.

Predicting Aurora: ACE and the solar wind

Now we are really getting into the meat of the matter. The ACE satellite is located just upstream from the Earth, so it basically measures the solar wind about an hour before it reaches us at the Earth. But why does the solar wind matter?

The aurora is essentially a result of a huge energy release. This huge amount of energy that gets pumped into Earth's geospace is coming from the sun, via the solar wind. So if we want to know when there will be a lot of geomagnetic activity, we need to know when the solar wind is going to be putting a lot of energy into the system.

This is the ACE plot I look at most often. You can follow links on that page to look at longer or shorter timescales and also at different variables. Here is how to interpret this plot:

In the top panel, the red trace shows Bz which is important. This is the vertical component of the sun's magnetic field (the sun has a magnetic field too!). The white trace shows the magnitude of the sun's magnetic field. A high magnetic field strength is good (say, over 6 nT). Generally, if Bz is high, but also flipping between north and south (large positive to large negative) this is a good thing.

The solar wind speed and density are also important. Ideally, for strong activity you would like to see a high solar wind speed and a high density. Unfortunately, if the speed is high, the density is usually lower, and vice versa. This is like cars on a road, if you let them go fast the spread out, but if they have to go slowly they get bunched up. For solar wind speed, 300 km/s is kind of a baseline. Getting up to 600 km/s is really good. For the density, 1 /cm^3 is baseline, and getting up to 10 /cm^3 is really good.

The NOAA page takes this information and tries to put it in an easy-to-understand "dial" plot, and they will have a little arrow pointing to the current value (like a car speedometer):

This plot can be found on this page.

One of my favorite plots to look at combines the data from ACE and from Stereo-B. Check it out. This shows the solar wind density, velocity, and magnetic field from both satellites, only the data is shifted appropriately along the x-axis so that they should line up in time. This is a great way to see solar wind changes that might be observed at Earth.

Next up will be the GOES satellites, which give us around a one hour predictor.

Predicting Aurora: Stereo B

Stereo-A and -B are a NASA satellites that are taking images of the sun. If you looked down on the Earth-Sun line from above, you would find them here:

Stereo-A is named A because it is on approximately the same orbit as Earth, except Ahead. Stereo-B is Behind. So imagine we see a new sunspot, as viewed from the Earth. The sun is rotating, so then Stereo-A will see it, and then (assuming it hasn't disappeared) Stereo-B will see it, and then it will be back in view from the Earth. With these three views, we basically have full coverage of the surface of the sun. This is useful, because if a new sunspot appears on the exact opposite side of the Earth, we still get a warning, because we can see it in Stereo-B. This gives us our ~3 day predictor. [Sidenote: These two satellites are slowly drifting further ahead and behind (while still staying on an orbit similar to Earth's), so we are probably looking at slightly more than 3 days at this point.]

Here you can find the latest images from both Stereo satellites.

The Stereo satellites are also measuring the solar wind. Next up we will talk about the ACE satellite, which is measuring the solar wind just upstream from the Earth.

Predicting Aurora: Kp index

I was recently talking with my brother, who spent his summer closer to the auroral oval than I did. He had a lot of opportunities to see really good aurora and asked what some of my methods are for knowing when the lights will be bright. So I'm going to do this blogging series, Predicting Aurora.

It will be fun.

So one thing he was checking was the Kp index. Kp index is averaged over three hours from ground magnetometers across the US and Canada. Basically, when a lot of geomagnetic activity will occur in conjunction with auroral activity. The geomagnetic fluctuations can be observed on the ground. Then they are averaged and put into this arbitrary 0-9 scale. Usually if Kp is below 3 aurora will be limited or be at very high altitudes. Kp between 4-6 will make really awesome aurora (as long as it is close to midnight over the US & Canada, and not noon). If Kp goes above 6, anyone living below latitudes of 45 degrees should go outside because you could be getting a rare auroral treat.

This is where I go to view the Kp index.

There is another great advantage of the Kp index. You can keep track of it on longer timescales than the 3 day plot linked above, and this gives you a method for predicting activity ~27 days in advance. From the Earth, we observe the sun to have a rotation period of ~27 days. So, if we see a sunspot and observe aurora to occur in conjunction with that sunspot, it is likely that sunspot will reappear again once the sun makes a full rotation. Obviously sunspots don't last forever, so we might only see each one two or three times, but it is still a good predictor.

And lucky for us, someone has already taken the time to keep an updated plot of the Kp index on this conveniently useful cycle of 27 days. So if you go here, you will find that often, spikes of high Kp are on top of each other.

Next up will be how to predict aurora ~3 days in advance.

Origin of the Aurora

Mister Sun-Shine! Mister Golden Sun! Please shine down on me!

AURORA!

We saw it last night! yay! I need to get myself dressed for talks. I also need to learn to use manual focus in the dark... These photos make it to the adventure blog due to blurriness. Hopefully I'll see more aurora, and be more in focus next time!

Aurora: with photos (finally) from yours truly.

Last night there was a fairly stable arc far to the north. I took my camera out and borrowed Steve's tripod.





These are the photos I was able to get with my little point and shoot camera. Pretty good eh?!

Making the Most of Fairbanks

Okay, so here is a quick update of what has been going on here. Our last night of the February launch window was March 4, and we were out for winds the entire night, and were not able to launch into the amazing aurora we were seeing.


Here is a super awesome photo of me in front of some aurora taken by Mike Nicolls. That was not March 4, but the level of amazing was comparable.

So now we have to wait until the March launch window. This does not start until March 15. The main reason we have to have some days in between windows is to avoid the moon. Right now the moon is very bright so we lose all of our ground optics.

I had big plans to take a short vacation in Denver, for the purpose of visiting friends and getting out of Fairbanks. Well that didn't work out so well, because the University of Alaska Fairbanks has spring break this week and every single flight out of this state is oversold and ridiculously expensive.

Now my plan is to just stay in Fairbanks during this break. It works out really conveniently that there is this Plasma Entry and Transport workshop going on next week. So basically I can go listen to some bigshots in my field of study talk about what they do, and that should be really beneficial for me.

Today and yesterday I have spent my time realizing just how introverted I actually am. I have had two days all to myself and I am feeling completely re-energized, which is great. I have this plan to check out the coffee shops in Fairbanks to find the best one for sitting and reading. Usually we just go to a drive through coffee hut, because we didn't have time for the luxury of sitting and reading. Today I went to the Alaska Coffee Roasting Co, and I finally feel at home in Fairbanks. Not only do they sell my favorite coffee (only the beans, they won't brew it for me) but they also make the most delicious vanilla latte. Sidenote: I had been doing really well with just drinking coffee and avoiding fancy specialty coffee beverages, but it seems that Fairbanks does not support that type of behavior. Every single coffee place only makes good espresso beverages and has really horrible brewed coffee. It is strange, but that is how it is.

Also, yesterday I saved $.50 per gallon on gas because of all the groceries we have purchased from the Safeway. I bet you guys are glad I shared that one huh? I heard this statistic that on average, every blog has just one reader. I know that at least my mom and my aunt are reading this, so I am totally beating the odds.

Second to lastly, it snowed maybe ten inches yesterday so Fairbanks is beautiful and snow covered! It is really quite lovely!

And lastly, there is a contra dance tonight, and I am definitely going. Should be fun!

Week 4 with a 40 degree temperature change

Things have been very busy around here! Last night Gerald Lehmacher's four Turbopause rockets launched. They were pretty neat to watch too. The rockets were smaller than our rocket (only reaching about 100km, whereas we will go to about 600km), but they had a chemical release of TMA that leaves a glowing trail you can see. Then they use ground optics to study the turbulence in the upper layers of the atmosphere. Plus you can basically see the TMA trail from all parts of Alaska which is really cool.

Here is a photo I took of the third rocket launch.


Here is a photo from Craig Heinselman, who has a better camera and better photography skillz. I really like this picture because you can see the rocket, the aurora, and the LIDAR beam. The Lehmacher team was using the LIDAR to see if there was enough turbulence to launch.


This is Craig Heinselman's photo of the TMA trail from one of the rockets. There was a TMA release on the upleg and on the downleg. The upleg portion is higher up on this photo and more blurred. The downleg portion was not a pulsed stream, instead of steady, from what I could tell, and you can kind of see that in the bottom line of TMA.

So that provided us with tons of fun and entertainment. We didn't leave the range until after 3am, since each of the rockets were launched 30 minutes or slightly more apart. Today we actually get to report to the range a little later though, since they are doing playbacks for the Lehmacher mission and won't be ready for us right away.

It has been awhile since I posted anything here, and even though we haven't launched our rocket, we have been keeping busy with other things. On a side note, I am trying to keep our group webpage updated more regularly, if you want to check it out. I think I actually have all of the photos (or will have) from that site plus additional ones here.



Me in front of the Poker Flat Incoherent Scatter Radar. When I went to radar summer school last year this is what I was learning about.


Sunset as seen from TM, a good sign of clearing skies!


Darla and her weather balloons used to check winds.


The rocket on the rail. Ours is the big one. Lehmacher is the little baby rocket to the left.

And here are a few extra things just for fun:


A very serious sign in the balloon building.


A weird thing at the Museum of the North.


A cute art at the Museum of the North

OH and one last bit of interesting news. There are two BBC guys here taking photos of aurora and rockets and stuff. If you are familiar with The Planet Earth series, this is a new show they are doing that branches off of that called The Frozen Planet, which (according to wikipedia) will show in 2011. Two years to wait for fame is not so bad.

Amazing aurora last night!

This photo is again from Craig Heinselman.

Last night we had some pretty great activity. Unfortunately our rocket is still not ready to launch, so no one was really talking about weather it was a "launchable" event or not. Probably it wouldn't have been because of the clouds. We have people at field stations further north of here with ground cameras, so we want clear skies at all of these places preferably, and last night we only had half clear skies overhead.

This photo is actually really cool because you can see the back of the science center, including the indoor glass observing room, and also the outdoor observing balcony. Also, the aurora was very interesting because it was showing a lot of small scale structure, as pictured in the upper right of this photo where you can see the stripes of aurora and no aurora.

ACES launch!

Yesterday I decided to stay out at Poker Flat with the ACES science team. This is another rocket team that was nearing the end of their launch window. They are working nights, so I hadn't really been a part of any of that action, but I had been meaning to stick around and check it out. The only problem was that they work until 3am, and we start work at 8am, so that wouldn't be great for sleeping. I managed to sleep 10 hours on tuesday night in preparation though. Plus they have couches in the science center glass room for taking naps viewing the aurora.

Here is a view of the glass room that I took a few days ago.


So anyhow, I am hanging out, trying to not get in the way of the ACES team too much. For practically the first time in 14 days there were clear skies, no high winds, and some aurora. Each of these things had continued to prevent a launch. I have also been checking out weather forecasts and space weather predictions quite regularly while I have been here, so I was getting the idea that wednesday night would be the last chance for this team to launch.

All night there was visible aurora. For the most part it was a stable arc very far north of us, beyond where the ACES rockets could reach. So we were just waiting and waiting for the arc to move far enough south to be able to give the team good science. Sometimes the auroral arc would gradually move south and then we would see a small substorm breakup and the arc would move north again. Here is a photo that was taken a few nights earlier, but shows the type of aurora I am talking about.

This photo, along with all other aurora photos in here are from Craig Heinselman, who is a space physics genius.

The following are photos of the aurora from last night that the ACES rockets were launched into.


This was seriously the most beautiful and dynamic aurora I have ever seen.


ACES consisted of two rockets, a high-flier and a low-flier. I think the high flier went to maybe 400km and the low flier to 150km or so. I am mostly making those numbers up, but I think they are fairly accurate. This would put one rocket above the aurora and one below it, which is pretty cool. Here are long exposure photos of each of the rockets.

On each of these photos you can see a red line near the rocket trajectory line. That is the red light that is on the weather balloon they launch at around t-10 minutes in order to make sure the winds are fine for launch.

My favorite part was when the second rocket flew through the smoke from the motors of the first rocket and you could see the smoke completely clear out.

Also, if you want to check out more of Craig's photos here is his rocket album.