We are getting good equatorial airglow images from the SI-13 imager on IMAGE. 2002 was a very nice year for this. 2003 has been hindered by a sun crossing, but we are now operating in a mode (sun safing *off*) which allows full observations with each orbit.
More explanations to follow, but first a link to a gallery of all the keograms of the northern airglow band that I have produced so far for year 2002, days 87-129.
These keograms are simply the latitudinally integrated intensity (0-25 N degrees) of the northern band as a function of longitude. The longitudes of observations constantly shift westward, as the night terminator and all local times also shift @15 degrees/hour. The 20 MLT location is indicted by a bright white line.All the dark stripes are drifting plasma bubbles. As you can see, we saw a lot of spread-F associated depletions in brightness/plasma density in 2002.The technique for producing the keograms is described in this preprint which has been submitted to GRL.
The coordinates are magnetic, except I used Greenwich as a zero point. So read these roughly as geographic longitude sector. 30 is Egypt. 90 is India-China. 180 is the Pacific Ocean.
Our first correlative measurements
with another instrument are with ROCSAT, a low-latitude spacecraft which
can provide plasma density and electric field measurements. During theApril
2002 storm period, ROCSAT passed through the equatorial region and encountered
a series of plasma bubbles, which were also in our field of view. Some
summary plots show one conjunction.