Aurorasaurus Project Featured in NASA Earth Observatory Article

Aurorasaurus Project Featured in NASA Earth Observatory Article

The Aurorasarus project was recently featured in a NASA Earth Observatory article titled Brilliant Borealis.

This article states that at 2:20 a.m. Central Daylight Time on February 4, 2022, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP satellite took the above  image of the aurora borealis over central Canada and Hudson Bay.

These auroras were visible due to a geomagnetic storm where solar wind made up of pressure waves and magnetic energy from the Sun interact with the Earth’s magnetic field.

When solar particles collide with the Earth’s upper atmosphere, they excite the oxygen and nitrogen molecules found there to release photons, and thus we can see the beautiful lights of the aurora borealis.

Aurorasaurus is a citizen science project, where anyone who sees the aurora from where they are can report it on the Aurorasaurus website. The project tracks aurora around the world through reports to the Aurorasaurus website and on Twitter. Then they generate a real-time global map of those reports.

The Aurorasaurus project is a public-private partnership with the New Mexico Consortium and supported by the National Science Foundation and NASA.

You can read the entire article by Michael Carlowicz and learn more about the aurora borealis at: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/149435/brilliant-borealis