Amateur Radio for Students and the General Public By Laura Brandt (museum educator), Connie Atkisson (teacher), and Liz MacDonald (scientist) Last fall, Dr. Liz and Laura got their Technician (entry-level) ham radio licenses as part of auditing a class for teachers, grad students, and undergrads on The Physics of Ham Radio taught by Rice University[…]
Laura here! I am an aurora enthusiast, but new to the science side. Fortunately, the Aurorasaurus blog and website are full of great resources that I’ll be sharing out as I cultivate my knowledge. You’re bundled up in warmth and ready to aurora-watch, and you hear the Kp index is 6. Is that a good[…]
Guest post by Jeremy Kuzub Attending AGU 20? Jeremy will be presenting Keogramist as a poster in The MacGyver Session: The Place for Novel, Exciting, Self-Made, Hacked, or Improved Sensors and Software Solutions to Understand Space Weather eLightning on December 15, 2020 at 6:00 AKT/7:00 PT/8:00 MT/9:00 CT/10:00 ET/15:00 UTC. There will be a Q&A element, so bring any questions[…]
The plucky subauroral phenomenon STEVE (Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement) has struck again! Teamwork between citizen scientists and scientists Joshua Semeter, Michael Hunnekuhl, Elizabeth MacDonald, Michael Hirsch, Neil Zeller, Alexei Chernenkoff, and Jun Wang, has led to new information and new mysteries about features in STEVE’s dapper green picket fence structure. The team’s work—which includes[…]
After our first anti-racism meeting in support of #Strike4BlackLives, the Aurorasaurus team has been holding monthly meetings alongside members of the aurora science and citizen science communities on further action items to hold ourselves accountable. If you are interested in joining us for future meetings, please let us know at aurorasaurus.info@gmail.com. In this post, Liz[…]
Laura here! I am an aurora enthusiast, but new to the science side. Fortunately, the Aurorasaurus blog and website are full of great resources that I’ll be sharing out as I cultivate my knowledge. This week: what is Bz (pronounced “bee-zee”)? It sounds complicated but this post by former intern Sean McCloat makes it clearer.[…]
My backstory with the Aurora and Aurorasaurus The moment I saw my first aurora is forever ingrained in my memory. The Halloween Storms of 2003 left the night skies above my Minnesota house dancing with green and purple lights, and seeing them at four years old as I walked down my neighborhood street, trick-or-treating with[…]
Guest post by Aurorasaurus Ambassador Jeremy Kuzub This article is the second of three about how researchers and citizen scientists record and explore years of auroral activity using all-sky cameras, keograms, and software visualizations. The first post is available here. Looking Up The first step in aurora borealis research is just looking up at the night[…]
In the early morning hours of July 13, a slow-moving coronal mass ejection from the Sun arrived early on its journey to Earth. That afternoon, word spread across social media in Europe, Canada, and the US: there might be aurora tonight. No one knew, however, whether it would last long enough for this part of Earth[…]
by Kasha Patel Reposted from NASA Earth Observatory Every summer in the Northern Hemisphere, electric blue streaks form high in the atmosphere. These seasonal clouds typically lurk about 80 kilometers (50 miles) overhead in the mesosphere around the Arctic, but every once in a while they form at lower latitudes. In 2019, the clouds showed up in places where[…]
