Originally Posted by piper28

Interesting that the line before that indicates the flight was listed as jackson to flint and then has diverted on that. Flight path does have it going to the flint area first.

I would think based on the positioning of the plane that there'd be too much light polution to be doing aurora watching. Straight north to get just north of lansing would make more sense than that rather than flying up to flint then working your way SE. That area has a fair amount of light polution. Quite honestly, it's pretty rare that we can see the Aurora from this far south anyways (and I'd say just about every time it's supposed to be possible it's almost guaranteed to be cloudy).

The patterns flown make more think more along the lines of surveying.