Lecturer: Sota Nanjo (IRF) Date: 2025-01-16 10:00 Place: Aniara
Automated observations of auroras with a commercial digital camera in Tromsø
Sota Nanjo
Swedish Institute of Space Physics
Abstract.
As an activity of citizen science, pictures of auroras taken by photographers using commercial digital cameras have been used for scientific research. Such digital images contain a lot of background noise in various wavelengths, unlike professional optical data captured with a narrow-band optical filter. However, commercial digital cameras have three RGB channels and can capture what we see by eyes in full color. This capability often enables us to identify characteristics of optical phenomena that are difficult to notice in monochromatic data (MacDonald et al., 2018; Shiokawa et al., 2018). Furthermore, it has been suggested that the colors of auroras in images can be used to estimate the average energy of electrons responsible for pulsating auroras (Nanjo et al., 2021); thus, observations by photographers have the potential to play an essential role in scientific research of auroras. However, unlike professional researchers, who automatically observe auroras overnight, photographers have to wait for the appearance of auroras to take pictures, which is often a heavy burden for them. To reduce this difficulty, researchers can provide a system that notifies people of the auroral appearance in real time. One of the reasons why such a system has not been developed so far is that the aurora's complex and diverse morphology made it challenging to detect them with high accuracy. However, with the improvement of deep learning techniques, that problem has almost been solved (Clausen & Nickisch, 2018; Kvammen et al., 2020). In this study, we developed a deep-learning model that automatically detects auroras and then combined it with real-time observation by a commercial digital camera in Tromsø, Norway (Nozawa et al., 2018) to build a website "Tromsø AI" that notifies users of auroral occurrences in real-time. In the presentation, we will show how to use this website and how it can be used for the observation which automatically tracks auroras.
The seminar is also online. See emails for connection details.
Created 2024-12-02 10:18:25 by Mats Holmström Last changed 2025-01-13 14:21:12 by Mats Holmström
