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UAF PhD Student Vincent Ledvina Is the ‘The Aurora Guy’

On Halloween night, 2003, a young boy named Vincent Ledvina is walking home after a cold midwestern evening of trick-or-treating. He looks up and sees something bright and green shimmering across the sky. “Is that the aurora?” he asks his parents. They aren’t sure. But young Ledvina, having seen the wonders of the upper atmosphere with his own eyes for the first time, is hooked.

Now a second-year Ph.D. student in Space Physics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Ledvina studies the aurora borealis. He is working to understand the intricacies of these beautiful—and even life-changing—natural phenomena using both NASA and citizen-sourced data. 

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