Two views of a Perkin-Elmer Patrol Spectrograph used to photograph spectra of aurora occurring along a given magnetic meridian of the sky. The individual visible in the photographs is unidentified.

The Perkin-Elmer Corporation built spectrographs such as this one for the Aurora and Airglow Program, one of a comprehensive series of global geophysical activities spanning July 1957 to December 1958. Known collectively as the International Geophysical Year (IGY), such activities were timed to coincide with the high point of the eleven-year cycle of sunspot activity and included investigations of aurora and airglow, cosmic rays, geomagnetism, gravity, determinations of longitude and latitude, meteorology, oceanography, seismology, solar activity, and the upper atmosphere.