Into the light of the night sky: scientists at a research center near Fairbanks, Alaska, are shooting rockets into the aurora borealis to measure the phenomenon's effect on telecommunications and other activities.

• Author: Gillis, Alex

The Poker Flat Research Range is eerie at night. Located about thirty miles northeast of Fairbanks, Alaska, at the end of a winding gravel road, the place is desolate and bitterly cold as winds blow off the snow fields. Trees line the road and are silhouetted against the brightly lit sky. But the light isn't coming from the small capital city of some eighty thousand people nearby. It comes from the aurora borealis, or northern lights, those mesmerizing green-white, pinkish-yellow, or blue-purple lights that appear in the sky in the arctic regions of northern countries.

But what makes this 5,132--acre site eerie is that there are retry few people around at night, yet the machinery studding the area hums and moves all the same. In a field beyond the gravel road, 256 posts stand like mutated scarecrows, each post about six feet high, with four or five arms sticking out--the entire field listening to the disturbances in sound transmission caused by the mysterious lights in the sky. "Imaging riometer antennae" they are called, owned and jointly operated by the Japanese Communications Research Laboratory with the University of Alaska. There is a building nearby, the ten thousand-square-foot Nell Davis Center (named for the man whose efforts lauched the rocket-research facility itself), which is filled with computer banks and is the principal data-gathering and observation facility, as well as the hub for rocket command, at Poker Flat. Nearby, on the ground, huge metallic, radar dishes creak and moan as they twist, tracking satellites zipping somewhere in space. Every so often, the dishes turn quickly, as if trying to reel in a naughty satellite making a run for it. The machines have brains.

At night, those brains rest in windowless trailers in the compound. They are the physicists, launch officers, and others who program and monitor the machines. The men and women here chose to work at the world's largest, land-based rocket range because Poker Flat is famous for its rocket launches and aurora studies.

Fairbanks itself is unique. "It's a little bit of a frontier town," says one scientist. "I remember, before I came here, my boss described Fairbanks as a place where, if you went into a bar, the person on the left is on the run from the law and the person on your right is a retired astronaut. It's a bit like that here."

In 1968, in keeping with the frontier atmosphere, scientists named their new rocket range after the pastoral village of Poker Flat...