Scientific research doesn’t often start from outreach
projects. Yet, Ryuho Kataoka from the National Institute of Polar Research in
Tokyo, Japan, came up with an idea for a new method to measure the height of
aurora borealis after working on a 3D movie for a planetarium. Kataoka and
collaborators used two digital single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras set 8 km apart
to capture 3D images of Northern Lights and determine the altitude where
electrons in the atmosphere emit the light that produces aurora. The results
are published today in Annales Geophysicae, a journal of the European
Geosciences Union (EGU).