NORVIS: a portable broadband imaging spectrograph for auroral observations

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Preprint posted on EGUsphere on October 26, 2026, and under open review for Geoscientific Instrumentation, Methods and Data Systems.

Co-authored paper led by the Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy together with the team. It describes the instrument whose observations feed the auroral spectra classification work presented at and in the .

NORVIS

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

NORVIS (NORdlys Versatile Imaging Spectrograph) is a portable broadband imaging spectrograph for coordinated auroral observations across a network of high-latitude observatories.

is led by the Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy (BIRA-IASB) and developed by the team, together with IPAG (Grenoble), the Tromsø Geophysical Observatory (UiT), the Swedish Institute of Space Physics (IRF Kiruna), the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS) and the Finnish Meteorological Institute. “Nordlys” means aurora in Norwegian.

The instrument

A slit spectrograph covering 380 to 860 nm in a single acquisition at about 1.2 nm resolution, housed in a lightweight 3D-printed enclosure. Three cameras work together: a cooled science camera records the spectrum, a slit-context camera locates the slit on the sky, and a wide-field camera captures the surrounding auroral morphology. All units share the same optical and acquisition design, so that spectra from different sites can be compared directly.

A network of identical units

First light took place during a campaign at Skibotn Observatory, Norway, in February 2026, with about 1200 spectra reduced over three nights. A permanent unit at the Kjell Henriksen Observatory in Svalbard recorded its first auroral spectra on October 5, 2026. Further deployments are planned at Kiruna, Skibotn and Nyrölä, forming a distributed network operated within a researcher-citizen science framework. The instrument is described in a for Geoscientific Instrumentation, Methods and Data Systems.

First auroral spectra of the Svalbard unit, October 5, 2026: wide-field context image (the red circle marks the slit pointing) and the integrated NORVIS spectrum, with the main emission lines identified.

My involvement

Within the STAROS development team, I am in charge of the software development of the NORVIS Suite (acquisition, reduction and visualisation applications) together with Guillaume Bertrand, and I am a co-author of the instrument paper. The project is the natural continuation of my work on the automated analysis of auroral spectra, from the of ASIS spectra to on the full archive: a network of identical spectrographs producing spectra every 30 seconds is exactly the setting where such methods become necessary.

NORVIS Viewer: a reduced spectrum, its zoomed view and the simultaneous sky camera image.

Images: NORVIS project, BIRA-IASB (norvis.aeronomie.be).

Instrumentation |

NORVIS: a portable broadband imaging spectrograph for auroral observations

NORVIS

The instrument

A network of identical units

My involvement