The story
A photographer southeast of Fairbanks, Alaska, recorded an uncommon phenomenon in the early Saturday night sky – a magnificent and dazzling spiral encircled by the aurora borealis.
But the unexpected heavenly centerpiece had a very different quality: it was moving.
Photographer Todd Salat told the Anchorage Daily News, “It got bigger and bigger.” It took just five minutes for the “beautiful piece of art in the sky” to almost fill the sky right above you.
“I had no idea what it was at all… I’d say this was probably the strangest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Midwife Elizabeth Withnall had seen something similar hundreds of miles northeast in the isolated Arctic village of Kotzebue.
“In the far north, we see a lot of strange things in the sky,” Withnall told the news source.
“I’ve seen rainbows around the moon and fog bows. So I just thought, “This strange thing in the sky is pretty cool, but I don’t know what it is.”
A spiral
According to Don Hampton, a professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, the “weird thing” was created by humans and “appears to be rocket engine exhaust from a SpaceX Transporter-7 mission that launched on the Falcon 9 approximately three hours earlier in California.”
The two-stage launch rocket Falcon 9, which can be used more than once, finished a “rideshare program mission” where 51 other spacecraft were kept.
“Water vapor in the exhaust of the second stage engine solidifies and captures high-altitude sunlight, effectively illuminating and forming this spiral galaxy…”This flyby over Alaska astonished many stargazers,” Hampton informed the News via email.
Despite the fact that the rational explanation was guaranteed to soothe many in the true north, it seems that the two local photographers loved getting caught up in the unexpected phenomena.
“Trust me, I was completely perplexed at first… “I kind of liked the feeling of being in the unknown,” Salat posted on Facebook.
“Are you serious, Elon?” Do you have to spoil my aurora? “I was hoping a spaceship would land and aliens would jump out,” Withnall said on Facebook.
