We set up all day Saturday. Here is a picture of Hans Nielsen working on the all sky camera that the Geophysical Institute runs here at Toolik. Hans is the associate director for the institute, and still does research! He is a real inspiration as a scientist.
The allsky data can be found here. Basically the all sky uses a fish eye lens, and focusses the entire sky into a single picture frame. It is very useful for telling what the overall auroral conditions are at a site. Typically, North is at the top of the picture, and east is to the left. Imagine you are laying on your back looking up, and your head is towards the north; this is the orientation of the image in the northern hemisphere.
We had a good aurora last night, fairly early in the evening. We had been setting up all day long, and got the high speed photometer and one of the high speed cameras working. The computer that runs the other camera did not like the cold outside in our little observatory, and we had to bring it back in to warm up. Last night is was about -30 degrees F outside, but the inside of our dome was staying around +30. Unfortunately we have to open the dome all the time to set the equipment up, and the temeprature fell enough that the one computer complained. We will try setting it up in the daylight today. It is at least sunny today, and is a bit warmer out. I will take pictures of our setup after we get everything working and upload them.
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