Dr. Ian P. Griffin and two students – Vaughn Malkin and Chris Campbell, are working on the project, which would allow predictingthe aurora in Dunedin’s night sky.

Dr Griffin is the Director of Otago Museum, Dunedin, New Zealand. He is the former CEO of Science Oxford, in Oxford, UK, and the former head of public outreach at NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute. Griffin is a professional astronomer and public spokesman upon scientific matters.

So, he was quite surprised, when two third year Otago Polytechnic IT students, asked him to team up on project for their final year’s study. That’s how the cosmic compost project began.

How does it work?

Dr Griffin has created two magnetometers in the back of his Portobello garden, housed in a compost bin transform with duct tape and weed mat, and a rubbish bin full of soil and sporting a plastic pipe from its lid.

Linked to computer equipment in a small shed attached to his house, the magnetometers had been sending real time data to Mr Malkin and Mr Campbell, who had been processing it and loading it on to their website.

The two bins are used to protect the sensitive magnetometers from the bad weather. With some trial and error, the team had been regularly pipping Nasa, which uses satellites orbiting Earth, to the post when it came to predicting Otago aurora.

What do they expect?

They aimed to improve the process to the level where a simple website or Twitter could tell people in Dunedin whether they would see an aurora.

They want to link the magnetometers to a Twitter feed to alert people, with warnings of 10 to 15 minutes, to when the next aurora was likely to be visible above the city.

”The long term goal is to help people who come to Dunedin, to give them something they can use to see the aurora.”

In the nearest future, they expect to install a camera on the roof of Princes St’s Otago House.