We are a team of students from Bermuda investigating lightning on Earth as seen from the International Space Station.
We are interested in the Physics of the atmosphere. We have decided to investigate two fascinating phenomena: Lightning and the magnetosphere. When lightning strikes, some of the energy travels to the top of the atmosphere, and some free electrons can be sent into the magnetosphere and the Van Allen belt (arxiv.0906.0429). We want to detect lightning and see if the electromagnetic waves it produces affect our magnetometer. Approximately a flash/km^2/month hits the earth. When observed with a visible (or near IR) camera the results are beautiful. Our objective is to do image processing to detect lightning in almost real time. We want to count lightning strikes and see if magnetic fields change in a window of a couple of seconds around it. We estimate that in 3h the camera will be able to see around 24 million km^2. On average, this corresponds to 100,000 lightning strikes. However, lighting and path of flight may divide the numbers by 10 or 100. In addition, we saw in previous astropi pictures that the field of view of the camera is sometimes obstructed, so the area may be smaller too. Overall, we hope to record the location and effect of hundreds of lightning strikes.
You will need to install the following libraries to run this code:
sudo pip3 install opencv-python -i https://www.piwheels.hostedpi.com/simple
sudo pip3 install scikit-image -i https://www.piwheels.hostedpi.com/simple
sudo pip3 install numpy
sudo apt-get install python3-scipy
Detection of lightning from a camera on the ISS (Our image processing code can identify bright blobs in the atmosphere)
To run the experiment, run:
python3 bermycode.py