From the pristine dark of his backyard in rural Alberta, Canada, Alan Dyer has taken stunning photos of a rare sky glow called STEVE. To capture this ribbon of mauve, he and other citizen scientists typically let their cameras collect light for seconds at a time. Long exposures smear out STEVE’s finer details in favor of making its color pop. But when a STEVE stretched over his house one August night in 2022, Dyer tried a different approach.
That confusion is par for the course when it comes to the science of STEVE — short for Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement. Ever since citizen scientists first showed researchers their images of STEVE a few years ago, they’ve raised more questions than they answered. Firing a sensor-strapped rocket through STEVE could identify the molecules responsible, Nishimura says. “But the challenge is that we need to know when and where STEVE is going to happen, and that’s extremely difficult.”
In March 2015, citizen scientist Ian Griffin captured this footage of a red SAR arc mutating into a purple STEVE streak.
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