The PI will make modifications to his field-proven instrumentation and participate in a summer campaign in 1996. The spectrometer used in the 1995 campaign will have improved sensitivity, allowing definitive measurements of ratios between the neutral N2 and the ionized N2+ bands. This improved sensitivity will be facilitated by using a higher gain image intensifier system, which will "see" the night sky background. The PI will continue using the spectrometer with vertical grating rulings to obtain spectrograms, which are spatially resolved in the vertical direction, providing height resolved spectra. The spectrometer will also be used in a special mode to obtain a coarse resolution spectra of other commonly observed optical emission phenomena; the elves.***
