Vincent Ledvina, a physics student and gifted astrophotographer, captured a magnificent 8K video of the northern lights.
Ledvina just returned from a camping trip to Fort Yukon, Alaska, where he spent three weeks above the arctic circle photographing auroras over multiple clear-sky evenings. The astrophotographer is presently enrolled at the University of North Dakota, specializing in physics with aspirations of becoming a space weather forecaster.
Ledvina's aim during his tenure at the Fort Yukon Long Range Radar Site was to test a notion about the formation of pulsing or flashing auroras. "The design of the mission was to have the sounding rocket launch into the aurora from the city of Fairbanks on a northward trajectory while high-speed cameras captured the pulsating aurora in two locations, Venetie and Fort Yukon," Ledvina explains.
Eight of the seventeen nights that Ledvina spent at Fort Yukon had clear skies, and the auroras shone "extremely bright" owing to some solar wind that induced geomagnetic activity. The film was shot using a range of various lenses on Ledvina's Sony a7r II, Sony a7s, and Sony a7 iv cameras.
"The rocket's path would fly over the town of Venetie at an altitude of around 350 km and then crash land somewhere in the remote wilderness in the north slope of Alaska," said Ledvina.
"Adding to my luck, some pockets of fast solar wind from the Sun helped spur geomagnetic activity, and the auroras were extremely bright and danced every night the skies were clear!"