Auroral Substorm from Polar
This movie is an auroral substorm event observed by the visible light camera aboard the Polar spacecraft.
Because the visible light camera records in a single broad range of wavelengths, we do not have color imagery of the event. For this movie we will color the aurora green since that is the dominant color in most cases. The VIS camera is also low resolution so the fine aurora details visible from the ground are not apparent in this movie.
This movie is an aurora with a substorm event observed by Polar.
Opening view of the Earth.
We move in close to the polar regions and see the faint glow of the aurora in green.
We see changes in the aurora pattern as the night progresses.
A slight brightening in northwestern Canada signals the start of the substorm.
The event continues to intensify.
Near the peak of the event, it has moved over Alaska.
The storm continues to fade and appears to move westward relative to the ground.
The event fades to invisibility.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
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Animators
- Tom Bridgman (Global Science and Technology, Inc.)
- Greg Shirah (NASA/GSFC)
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Producer
- Rani Gran (NASA/GSFC)
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Scientists
- Vassilis Angelopoulos (University of California at Berkeley)
- David G. Sibeck (NASA/GSFC)
- Harald Frey (University of California at Berkeley)
- Nicola Fox (Johns Hopkins University/APL)
Release date
This page was originally published on Wednesday, July 23, 2008.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:55 PM EDT.
Missions
This visualization is related to the following missions:Series
This visualization can be found in the following series:Datasets used in this visualization
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[Polar: VIS]
ID: 83
Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.