| Summary: | The Aurora Borealis, or the Northern Lights, is a magnificent display of colorful lights found by the North Pole, created by electromagnetically charged particles emitted from the sun colliding with gasses in the Earth's atmosphere. The brilliant colors correspond to the variety of atmospheric molecules, and the aurora varies in brightness or intensity, as related to the energy of the ionizing particles. The goal of this experiment is to identify specific, known spectral lines emitted by the aurora borealis, using student-designed and made emission spectroscopes, which will take images of the aurora partially in the ultraviolet-visible (350-700 nm) and infrared (700- 1400 nm) ranges. The Undergraduate Student Instrumentation Project (USIP) is a university-run research program led by Dr. Edgar Bering that creates balloon-borne and ground-based instruments to study the upper atmosphere and the aurora borealis. There are five instrument teams, one of which is the Auroral Spectroscopy team. The design of this experiment consists of a Newtonian telescope to which a spectrophotometer is attached. The spectrometer will split the light into the observed molecules' spectra using a series of lenses for focusing the light into a real image, a slit, and a transmission diffraction grating lens. The spectroscope will be further attached to a full-spectrum camera that will capture an image to be processed. The images captured of auroral sessions will be analyzed to obtain wavelength and intensity data, which will inform us of the energies of the observed molecules. Physics, Department of Honors College
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