Chasing the aurora borealis from video data

[dani-lbnl]

There are two movie files and two zip-files. These are two different observations of the aurora borealis (or northern lights) from the ground. The movies show the general time sequence where you will see the sudden brightening and fast expansion motion of the aurora in a process called substorm onset. The zip-files contain about 100 fits-files with the individual images of 256x256 pixels each at 15 second time steps.
The image processing tasks would be to:

•    Determine the time (frame number) when the sudden brightening of the aurora occurs
  

•    Determine the location (x-y pixel of center) where this brightening occurs in that frame
  

•    Determine the speeds in the horizontal (x) and vertical (y) directions the aurora brightening expands
  

  Science domain expert: Harald Frey
  Data: ftp://sprite.ssl.berkeley.edu/pub/hfrey/dani/