- Portable
- It can be transported in just a few medium-sized boxes, and can be mounted nearly everywhere, the camera can even be operated outdoors.
- Flexible
- Lens and filters can easily be changed, allowing a variety of different fields-of-views and frequency bands to be used.
- Digital
- Though an analog design, the video is digitized in real-time and stored on digital video tapes. This is probably the first auroral imager to use DVCAM technology.
- Cheap
- Designed so as to use prosumer equipment predominantly.
- Campaign-based
- In its current design, the imager must be operated manually. In next version it will be operating automatically, and controlled over the net.
News:
Eight video clips which shows coordinated radar and optical
observations of the drift of black aurora, used in an
article published
in Annales Geophysicae,
can be found here
(2004-10-22).
Jan Küchel has written the excellent report,
Calibration of the Odin imager; implementation and application.
Where he describes how the imager was calibrated, and what it can be used
for. This is the result of a 3 months stay here in Tromsø as a part
of is education at the Technical University of
Eindhoven, Netherlands (2004-07-20).
Read more about:
| PI: Mårten Blixt |
Background |
Finance |
Selected Events |
Campaign start page |
There has for a long time been a strong need for optical observations of auroral features to back up the observations done by the EISCAT radar in the Cosmical geophysics group in Tromsø.
In the late 80's Trond S. Trondsen built the Ramfjordmoen All-Sky Imager (RASI, seen to the left). However, after just one year of operation, Trond left for Canada, and built the excellent PAI imager.
After Mårten Blixt finished his PhD in late 2000, the time was right to pick up the thread again, and in the autumn of 2001 he started the planning and construction of Odin.
Finance:
It is financed partially by the Norwegian Research Council
(NFR), and by the
University of Tromsø.