Ground-based facility for spectrophotometric studies of the airflow and aurora

A 1 m Ebert-Fastie scanning spectrometer, a 0.6 m Czerny-Turner spectrometer equipped with an imaging photon detector, and 2 sets of filter photometers used for auroral and airglow studies are presented. The techniques employed for calibration of the instruments and the data reduction method are described. The latter involves nonlinear least squares fitting of synthetic spectra to the measurements. This provides an objective means to determine absolute emission rates of individual spectroscopic features. Several sample spectra and the corresponding fitting parameters are presented, with data obtained during the period September 1985 to April 1987.