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Mike Kofsky

The Northern Lights with GoPro

Last night we set out to see the Northern Lights with a special bent. A group of scientists (I’ll name drop later) set out helium weather balloons equipped with GoPro Cameras in order to get video of the Aurora Borealis from Space.

It’s mind boggling.

Essentially the GoPro cameras will be 20 miles up into the atmosphere recording the greatest light show science can provide. The launch can be done for about a thousand dollars and the cameras get an incredibly high quality. Higher in fact than any that’s been recorded from space.

I’m operating on four hours of sleep as we were watching the northern lights until 3am and then we were up bright and early for dogsledding. I’ve got a tiny break right now and then we’ve got a two mile hike (snowshoeing maybe?) to retrieve the cameras.

I am so excited to share the GoPro footage with you but in the interim here’s a video of last night’s display. Mike Kofsky from the Wall Street Journal took 3,000 one second exposure images and then threaded them together into 45 seconds of majesty.