Innovations in Visualization

Slicing the Aurora

Sebastian Lay
Jo Vermeulen
Charles Perin
Eric Donovan
Raimund Dachselt
Sheelagh Carpendale

Overview

The Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights is a phenomenon that has fascinated people throughout history. The AuroraMAX outreach initiative provides a collection of time-lapse videos of the night sky captured by a camera at Yellowknife in Canada. We have generated large-scale digital prints from a sequence of photographs of the northern sky taken over the course of one night. Each image is aggregated across time creating visually appealing and intriguing images – or Keograms – that visualize Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) activity as well as interesting movements of clouds and stars that occurred that night. We also created an interactive visualization of the Keograms that we exhibited at the local Beakerhead art-science festival.

Images

slicingtheaurora-prints slicingtheaurora-slices slicingtheaurora1 slicingtheaurora2

Publications

Sebastian Lay, Jo Vermeulen, Charles Perin, Eric Donovan, Raimund Dachselt, Sheelagh Carpendale. Slicing the Aurora: An Immersive Proxemics-Aware Visualization. In Immersive Analytics '16, ACM ISS 2016 Workshop. ACM, pages 91-97, 2016. PDF Paper
Sebastian Lay, Jo Vermeulen, Charles Perin, Eric Donovan, Raimund Dachselt, Sheelagh Carpendale. Slicing the Aurora. In Exhibit, IEEE VIS 2016 Arts Program (VISAP'16 Metamorphoses). IEEE, 2016. PDF Paper