Use of Astronaut Photography in Magnetospheric Research: A Proof of Concept Study

Astronauts on the International Space Station often take spectacular image sequences of the Aurora Borealis and Australis, with high time and spatial resolution, during intervals of strong auroral activity. A barrier to the use of these images in research is that they do not often have accurate pointing information, and as such are difficult to put in context and use alongside data from other sources, both ground- and space-based. Here we use automated starfield recognition software to reconstruct the pointing of astronaut photographs of the aurora during an ISS pass over North America during early 2012, and assess the usefulness of the technique by comparing the resulting mapped images with data from the THEMIS and CARISMA arrays of ground-based magnetometers and all-sky imagers and magnetometers on the GOES-13 and GOES-15 spacecraft.