Hoping to expand our understanding of auroras and other fleeting atmospheric events, a team of space-weather researchers designed and built NORUSCA II, a new camera with unprecedented capabilities that can simultaneously image multiple spectral bands, in essence different wavelengths or colors, of light. The camera was tested at the Kjell Henriksen Observatory (KHO) in Svalbard, Norway, where it produced the first-ever hyperspectral images of auroras—commonly referred to as "the Northern (or Southern) Lights"—and may already have revealed a previously unknown atmospheric phenomenon.

Details on the camera and the results from its first images were published today in the Optical Society's (OSA) open-access journal Optics Express.

Auroras, nature's celestial fireworks, are created when charged particles from the Sun penetrate Earth's magnetic field. These shimmering displays in the night sky reveal important information about the Earth-Sun system and the way our planet responds to powerful solar storms. Current-generation cameras, however, are simply light buckets—meaning they collect all the light together into one image—and lack the ability to separately capture and analyze multiple slivers of the visible spectrum. That means if researchers want to study auroras by looking at specific bands or a small portion of the spectrum they would have to use a series of filters to block out the unwanted wavelengths.