The Aurora Borealis is a beautiful phenomenon of dancing lights that have inspired stories and legends for centuries. Have you seen them? Aurorasaurus is the first citizen science project that collects relatively rare sightings of both the Northern and Southern Lights (called the Aurora Australis.) In order to improve real-time tracking and understanding of the lights (actually energized particles in Earth’s atmosphere interacting with energy generated by events on the Sun), your sighting helps researchers predict where they will occur next. Aurorasaurus lets you enter your observation of aurora through their website, but if your phone is handy, they have a mobile app as well. The app has instructions on how to characterize the frequency, location, and rare visual characteristics of the lights. They also collect tweets about auroras, map them, and ask people to help verify the tweets as real-time sightings. During periods of high auroral activity, Aurorasaurus sees a significant increase in public reporting which allows the project to ground truth the data being collected by other instruments. Better yet, if you’re a registered user of the project, they’ll send you alerts so you never miss the beautiful and scientifically-fascinating lights.

http://www.aurorasaurus.org