The data in this paper are from the Chinese Arctic Yellow River Station (YRS) at Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard with the geographic coordinates (78.92°N, 11.93°E) and the corrected geomagnetic latitude 76.24°. Since the end of 2003, three identical all-sky imagers have been installed to observe auroral phenomena. The system records 24 hours of auroral activity from October of each year to March of the following winter. The temporal resolution of two consecutive frames of observations is 10 s. The camera uses a 512 × 512 square pixel array with a geographic zenith located near the center of the field of view. The full-day field of view covers a diameter of about 1000 km. The spatial resolution ranges from 1.1 km at the zenith to 36 km at an altitude of 150 km. This dataset gives the observations from 2004-1-16 used in the article, as well as the data used in comparisons with other methods.