New Zealand star observers were baffled and amazed by strange spiral light formations in the night sky on Sunday night.
At about 7:25 p.m., Alasdair Burns, a star-gazing guide on Stewart / Rakiura Island, received a text message from a friend: Get out and look at the sky. “As soon as we left, it was very obvious what he was referring to,” Burns said.
He saw a huge spiral of blue light in the middle of the darkness. “It looked like a huge spiral galaxy, just hanging there in the sky and slowly drifting,” Burns said. “A rather strange feeling.”
Burns took a few pictures of the lights with a long exposure, capturing the spiral of his phone. “We quickly knocked on the doors of all our neighbors to get them out too. And so there were about five of us, all on our shared deck looking up and a little, well, a little freaked out.”
The country’s social astronomy and star-watching social media groups were enlightened with people posting photos and questions about the phenomenon, which was visible from most of the South Island. Theories abounded: from UFOs to alien rockets to commercial light screens.
“Premonition of our orbital black hole,” said one star observer. “The aliens are doing it again,” said another.
The reality was probably a little more prosaic, said Professor Richard Easther, a physicist at the University of Auckland, who described the phenomenon as “strange but easy to explain.”
Sometimes clouds of this nature occurred when a rocket carried a satellite into orbit, he said.
“When the propeller is ejected from the back, you have what is essentially water and carbon dioxide, which briefly forms a cloud in space that is lit by the sun,” Easther said. “The geometry of the satellite’s orbit and also the way we sit in relation to the sun: this combination of things was the right one to produce these completely absurd-looking clouds that were visible from the island of South “.
Easther said the rocket in question was likely the launch of Globalstar from SpaceX, which the company sent into low Earth orbit on Sunday at Cape Canaveral in Florida.
Burns had guessed that the spiral was probably a rocket, having read about a similar phenomenon in 2009, when a Russian missile launch caused huge blue spirals over Norway. Even knowing the probable source, he said, was a confrontational view. “None of us had ever seen anything like it before. It was spectacular.”