7/6/2023 0 Comments Alaska northern lights![]() ![]() A camera at the summit of Mauna Kea, outside the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan’s Subaru telescope, captured a spiral swirling through the night sky. In January, another spiral was seen, this time over Hawaii’s Big Island. “It’s just water vapor reflecting sunlight.” ![]() “I can tell you it’s not a galaxy,” he said. While it looked like a galaxy going over Alaska, he assures it wasn’t. “And we got that really cool looking spiral thing,” he said. The timing of the fuel dump was timed correctly for visibility over Alaska. It was a polar launch, which made it visible over a large swath of Alaska. The rocket took off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California Friday night with about 25 satellites as its payload. Photographers out for the northern lights show also posted their photos on social media. “It created a bit of an Internet storm with that spiral,” Hampton said. The appearance of the swirl was caught in time-lapse on the Geophysical Institute’s all-sky camera and shared widely. While not a common sight, Hampton said he’s seen such occurrences about three times. “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.” “When they do that at high altitudes, that fuel turns into ice,” he said. ![]() Sometimes rockets have fuel that needs to be jettisoned, said space physicist Don Hampton, a research associate professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute. It was simply excess fuel that had been released from a SpaceX rocket that launched from California about three hours before the spiral appeared. The cause early Saturday morning was a little more mundane than an alien invasion or the appearance of a portal to the far reaches of the universe. ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) - Northern light enthusiasts got a surprise mixed in with the green bands of light dancing in the Alaska skies: A light baby blue spiral resembling a galaxy appeared amid the aurora for a few minutes. ![]()
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