A large part of graduate school, or at least for me, was trying to catch up on all the previous research papers in my selected sub sub sub field. Having moved to an adjacent field when I started with BARREL meant that there was a whole new pile of background papers to read, and I read a lot. That said, I hadn't and still haven't read them all I'm sure.
Just this last week or so I decided to take a few days to read some of the "classics". I was inspired after re-finding the Carrington paper. If you haven't read it, you should. It's a fantastic paper about the Carrington event, perhaps the largest solar storm since we've had technology which can be affected by space weather. But that's a whole other story. What I found though was a treasure trove of papers from Winckler and co-authors. Specifically there was such a cool one on observations of a geomagnetic storm published in June 1959. They used a balloon for most of the experiment but branched out to all (or at least many) available data sets in order to explain the storm as completely as possible. It's a fantastic read, and my favorite part is where they discuss the large currents found in the telephone cables.
There are a bunch more, like the Parks and Winckler 1970 paper about a solar flare. This paper may have my favorite set of sentences ever:
The balloon flight, launched from the auroral zone (62.5N, 130W) was to detect atmospheric bremsstrahlung X-rays from precipitated Van Allen electrons. Owing to the absence of significant magnetospheric activity, the terrestrial X-rays were not detected. Instead, solar X-rays were intercepted from a class 2b Ha solar flare that erupted from McMath plage region 9567 near the central meridian.
When trying to capture events in nature, nature doesn't always do what you want it to (e.g. no geomagnetic activity), but you often still find something interesting to study, you just might have to change your thinking/field a bit.