Again, not aliens: New Zealanders were surprised by blue spirals in the sky, it turned out to be Musk's rocket

Spirals of blue light in the New Zealand night sky, thought to be formed from the exhaust plume of a SpaceX rocket, have puzzled astrologers. TheGuardian.

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New Zealand stargazers were puzzled and frightened by strange spiraling light formations in the night sky on June 19 in the evening.

Around 19:25 pm, Alasdair Burns, the star guide on Stewart/Rakiura Island, received a message from a friend: go outside and look at the sky. “Once we actually got outside, it was pretty obvious what he meant,” Burns said.

He saw a huge blue spiral of light among the darkness. “It was like a huge spiral galaxy that was just hanging in the sky and drifting slowly,” Burns said. “It gives off a pretty eerie feeling.”

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Burns took several long exposure shots of the lights using his phone to capture the spiral. “We quickly knocked on the doors of all our neighbors to show them too. We were all standing on our shared porch, looking up and just going a little crazy,” he said.

On the country's stargazing and amateur astronomy social media, people posted photos and asked questions about the phenomenon, which was visible from much of the South Island. Theories abounded, from UFOs to foreign missiles to commercial light displays.

“A premonition of our orbital black hole,” said one stargazer. “Aliens again,” commented another.

The reality was probably a bit more prosaic, said Professor Richard Easter, a physicist at the University of Auckland, who called the phenomenon "weird but easily explained."

These kinds of clouds sometimes form when a rocket puts a satellite into orbit, he said.

“When the fuel is ejected, you have what is essentially water and carbon dioxide that briefly forms a cloud in space, illuminated by the sun,” Easter said. "The geometry of the satellite's orbit, as well as where we are in relation to the sun, was the perfect combination of things to create these strange clouds that were visible from the South Island."

Easter said the rocket in question was likely SpaceX's Globalstar launch, which the company sent into low Earth orbit off Cape Canaveral in Florida on June 19.

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Burns speculated that the spiral was likely a rocket after reading about a similar phenomenon in 2009, when a Russian rocket launch caused huge blue spirals over Norway. Even knowing the likely source, he said, it was a stunning sight. “None of us have ever seen anything like this before. It was impressive,” he said.

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