Strange, Glowing Baby Blue Spiral In The Sky Over Alaska

A light baby blue spiral resembling a galaxy appeared amid the aurora for a few minutes, surprising aurora enthusiasts. The cause was a little more mundane than an alien invasion or the appearance of a portal to the far reaches of the universe early Saturday morning.

It was simply leftover fuel from a SpaceX rocket that took off from California about three hours earlier.

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According to space physicist Don Hampton

A research associate professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, rockets sometimes have fuel that needs to be jettisoned.

“When they do that at high altitudes, that fuel turns into ice,” he said. “And if it happens to be in the sunlight when you’re in the darkness on the ground, you can see it as a sort of big cloud, and sometimes it’s swirly.”

While not a common sight, Hampton said he’s seen such occurrences about three times. The appearance of the swirl was caught in time-lapse on the Geophysical Institute’s all-sky camera and shared widely. “It created a bit of an internet storm with that spiral,” Hampton said.

Photographers who went to see the northern lights also shared their images on social media.

“This all happened during a beautiful aurora display over Alaska, stunning many night-watchers including myself,” professional photographer Todd Salat, recognized for breathtaking northern lights images, told The Press in an email.

“Trust me, at first, I was totally bewildered,” he said. “I now know it can be explained with rocket science, but during and immediately after the experience, I thoroughly enjoyed the mysterious feeling of the unknown.” The rocket took off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Friday night with about 25 satellites as its payload. The timing of the fuel dump and the fact that it was a polar launch made the blue spiral visible over a large swath of Alaska.

“And we got that really cool-looking spiral thing,” Salat noted.

Another spiral was seen in January, this time over Hawaii’s Big Island. A camera at the summit of Mauna Kea, outside the Subaru telescope of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, captured a spiral swirling through the night sky. Researchers believe it was caused by the earlier launch of a military GPS satellite on a SpaceX rocket in Florida.