With eyes turned to the skies, stargazers taking in the Perseid meteor shower on Tuesday night witnessed something out of this world.
In a publication on Facebook, the Astrolab du parc national du Mont-Mégantic in Quebec’s Eastern Townships described it as “a magnificent and luminous spiral streaking across the sky at around 10:40 p.m.”
Several people in the Montreal area also witnessed the strange phenomenon and reached out to CBC News describing a bright light enveloped by a fuzzy halo and warning of a UFO sighting.
While it was certainly unusual, it wasn’t really an unidentified flying object, but more likely the result of a rocket launch, according to the Astrolab.
“It was in all likelihood the second stage of an Ariane 6 rocket which was igniting its engine in order to de-orbit itself after having released the European satellite Metop-SGA1 in a polar orbit,” the Facebook post explained.
The European Space Agency confirmed on its website that a weather satellite was launched Tuesday evening at 9:37 p.m. local time, from the European spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana — an overseas department of France located in South America.
The new satellite is meant to usher in “a new era of weather and climate monitoring from polar orbit.”
According to astrophysicist Robert Lamontagne, the rocket’s orbit is what allowed for the spectacle to be visible in Quebec.
Most of the time rocket launches are on an equatorial orbit and so will be visible near the equator, he said.
In a polar orbit, the rocket has to go around the earth circling each pole of the planet.
“So the the trajectory of that the rocket made it so that from our latitude it could be seen in Montreal or the south of Quebec,” he said.
But to witness the phenomena, other factors also need to align, according to Lamontagne, including the time of launch and the altitude reached by the rocket.
“From our point of view, we were in the dark, the sun was low below the horizon, but the rocket itself was so high that it was still lit by the by the sun,” he said.
And as the second stage of the rocket re-entered the earth’s atmosphere, he said, “it was spinning a little bit, there was exhaust gases coming out from it and that’s what people saw in the sky.”
A spokesperson for the Canadian Space Agency told CBC News that many observers captured video of the event, with the agency confirming it was the ESA’s Ariane 6 rocket.
