Wednesday, February 11, 2015

A Night at Poker Flat

A Night at Poker Flat: APOD: 2015 January 30 - A Night at Poker Flat


Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

2015 January 30


See Explanation. Clicking on the picture will download the highest resolution version available.
A Night at Poker Flat

Image Credit: NASA / Jamie Adkins
Explanation: Four NASA suborbital sounding rockets leapt into the night on January 26, from the University of Alaska's Poker Flat Research Range. This time lapse composite image follows all four launches of the small, multi-stage rockets to explore winter's mesmerizing, aurora-filled skies. During the exposures, stars trailed around the North Celestial Pole, high above the horizon at the site 30 miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska. Lidar, beams of pulsed green lasers, also left traces through the scene. Operating successfully, the payloads lofted were two Mesosphere-Lower Thermosphere Turbulence Experiments (M-TeX) and two Mesospheric Inversion-layer Stratified Turbulence (MIST) experiments, creating vapor trails at high altitudes to be tracked by ground-based observations.

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