For many graduate students, waking up at noon after a 4 a.m. bedtime is a sign of a night well spent. For a group of MIT students, it was simply the start of their workday — timed not to the sun, but to the aurora.Their goal was simple: to study plasma phenomena using the aurora borealis as a natural laboratory. The process, less so; working largely in darkness in Fairbanks, Alaska, the students conducted experiments in temperatures that dipped as low as -25 degrees Fahrenheit, using red headlamps for visibility. The sun set before 3 p.m., and even at its warmest, temperatures barely reached 20 F.The aurora provides a rare opportunity to observe plasma behavior directly, as charged particles that interact with Earth’s magnetic field produce visible, large-scale structures in the night sky. As Fairbanks is situated beneath a region of especially frequent auroral activity, it is one of the most reliable places in the world to observe these phenomena, though the conditions come with real constraints. For one thing, the extreme cold directly impacted the instrumentation. “Our laptops went from full battery to nearly empty in 10 minutes because of the cold,” says Leonardo Corsaro, a PhD student in physics at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) at MIT. “We were trying to transfer data as fast as possible before everything shut down; it was a race against time!”The challenges extended beyond the cold itself. “The cold can be managed,” says Leon Nichols, a PhD student in physics at PSFC. “With good planning, you can stay comfy in -20 F. The real difficulty was movement when deploying cameras far away from the roads. Walking through thick snow can burn up to 900 calories in an hour. We used cross-country skis to access some of the more remote terrain that would have taken hours to reach otherwise.”But the conditions were more than worth it: During their time in Alaska, the group witnessed the strongest solar storm in the past two decades, bringing the aurora to life in ways few will ever experience. “It felt like we were the only ones there,” Sydney Menne, a PhD student in nuclear science and engineering, recounts, “removed from the Earth and just entirely surrounded by the aurora, fully immersed in it.” The team was granted access to observation facilities at Poker Flat Research Range through the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute. Over the course of the trip, students deployed multiple all-sky camera systems across distances of up to 100 miles, enabling simultaneous observations of auroral structures from different locations. These cameras, which capture 360-degree images of the night sky, were paired with magnetometers to correlate visual auroral features with changes in Earth’s magnetic field. By combining spatially distributed imaging with magnetic field measurements, the team aimed to capture how auroral structures change across space, with the long-term goal of supporting three-dimensional reconstructions of the aurora. This year’s campaign also expanded the measurements beyond imaging, using muon detectors to explore possible correlations between visual auroral activity, magnetic field changes, and particle detections, offering a potential window into how high-energy particles in the upper atmosphere relate to visible auroral activity.