Spend long enough in America’s frozen North and you’ll get used to seeing breathtaking natural spectacles high in the sky. Most often they are shimmering curtains of light created when solar winds collide with the upper atmosphere.
To the photographer death salad, Northern Lights are worth waiting patiently in the cold night air. But early Saturday morning, near the town of Delta Junction, he caught sight of a meteorological phenomenon unlike anything he had ever seen.
Against a stunning background of rippling green light, a blue spiral blossomed from a bright light on the northern horizon, growing larger as it moved rapidly across the sky.
A time-lapse of the amazing view can be seen in the clip below, starting at around 1 minute 28 seconds into the video (timestamp 0950 UT).
“It was a beautiful piece of art in the sky,” Salat told Annie Berman of Anchorage Daily News.
Luckily, Salat was prepared and took some stunning photos of the spiral that we all appreciate.
As unusual as the sight may have been for Alaskans, it is far from the first time a glowing vortex has drawn attention by infatuated sky watchers. And it has a pretty simple explanation.
A few hours before the spiral’s appearance, half a continent away at California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket carrying dozens of satellites as part of its Transporter 7 mission.
Minutes after launch, the first stage rocket fell back to the surface and landed softly for reuse in future missions.
Meanwhile, the Falcon 9 upper stage continued into orbit, where it completed its mission before returning to Earth in a tumbling spiral.
If the remaining fuel was released into the upper atmosphere, the water vapor in the gases would have frozen into tiny, light-reflecting crystals.
Although we can only speculate as to the cause of this particular luminous vortex, celestial spirals associated with rocket launches have appeared for yearsmaking it a good bet that Salat snagged a space mission and not an invading cosmic jellyfish.
As stunning as the view is, not all lovers of natural beauty would like to see more of it.
Swarms of tiny satellites filling the night sky are becoming an astronomer’s nightmare. roam across star fields and pollute the unadulterated view of the sky.
Inevitably, with the rise of commercial spaceflight and the cheapening of orbital technology, glowing space spirals are becoming less mysterious. That means we’ll see more artworks like this blooming in the sky in the near future.
