Aurora lovers got a surprise mixed in with the green streaks of light dancing across the Alaskan sky: A bright baby blue galaxy-like spiral appeared amid the aurora within minutes.
The cause early Saturday morning was little more mundane than an alien invasion or the appearance of a portal to the far reaches of the universe. It was simply excess fuel dropped from a SpaceX rocket launched from California about three hours earlier.
Sometimes rockets have fuel that needs to be jettisoned, said space physicist Don Hampton, an associate research scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute.
“When they do that at high altitude, that fuel turns into ice,” he said. “And if it happens to be in sunlight when you’re in the darkness of the earth, you can see it as a kind of big cloud, and sometimes it’s spinning.”
While it’s not a common sight, Hampton said he’s seen similar occurrences about three times.
The appearance of the vortex was captured in time by the Geophysical Institute’s All-Sky Camera and widely shared. “It created a bit of an internet firestorm with this mascara,” Hampton said.
Photographers participating in the Northern Lights show also posted their photos on social media.
“This all happened as it passed over Alaska during a beautiful aurora display, stunning many night watchers, myself included,” professional photographer Todd Salat, known for his stunning aurora images, told The Associated Press in an email.
“Believe me, I was completely confused at first,” he said. “Now I know it can be explained by rocket science, but during and immediately after the experience I thoroughly enjoyed the mysterious sense of the unknown.”
The rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Friday night with about 25 satellites as a payload.
The timing of the fuel ejection and the fact that it was a polar launch made the blue spiral visible over much of Alaska. “And we have this really cool looking spiral thing,” Salat noted.
In January, another spiral was spotted, this time over the Big Island of Hawaii. A camera atop Mauna Kea, outside the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan’s Subaru Telescope, captured a spiral spinning across the night sky.
Researchers said it was from the launch of a military GPS satellite that took off earlier on a SpaceX rocket in Florida.
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