An Aurora Called 'Steve'? Strange Sky Phenomenon Investigated
By Sarah Lewin, Staff Writer | April 24, 2017 01:20pm ET
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Meet "Steve," a strange, new aurora feature discovered by citizen scientists and verified by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Swarm satellites.
Eric Donovan, a researcher at University of Calgary in Canada, first heard of "Steve" while talking to members of a Facebook group called the Alberta Aurora Chasers, who coordinate to track and photograph the northern lights in the Canadian sky (Alberta is a province in western Canada). While the colorful lights of an aurora normally ripple horizontally across the sky, Steve formed a distinctive purplish or greenish vertical streak.
To learn more about it, Donovan coordinated with the Facebook group to match sightings of the feature with data from the Swarm satellites, which measure Earth's magnetic field, and ground-based scientific cameras that monitor the sky. [Paragliding Through Aurora Borealis' Beauty (Video)]
"In 1997, we had just one all-sky imager in North America to observe the aurora borealis from the ground," Donovan said in an ESA statement. "Back then, we would be lucky if we got one photograph a night of the aurora taken from the ground that coincides with an observation from a satellite. Now, we have many more all-sky imagers and satellite missions like Swarm, so we get more than 100 [observations] a night."
More:
http://www.space.com/36583-new-aurora-feature-named-steve-investigated.html?utm_source=notification
