Bizarre curtain of lights floats across Hawaii night sky. What caused dazzling display?
What looked like a curtain of glowing green lasers floated across Hawaii’s night sky, conjuring up alien-like imagery among the stars.
But the otherworldly lasers are actually used to measure features that are right here on Earth. The Subaru Telescope’s Asahi Star Camera in Maunakea captured the “unusual” glowing lasers against a cloudy night sky on Saturday, Jan. 28.
“Last night (early morning 2023-1-28 HST) was cloudy on Maunakea,” the team wrote on YouTube. “But our Subaru-Asahi Star Camera captured quite an interesting view — green laser lights coming from the sky! It was only a second or less — but our keen viewers did not miss the event!”
Viewers later reported that the lights came from a remote-sensing laser (an altimeter called ATLAS) from the satellite ICESat-2/43613, the team wrote in the caption of the video on YouTube.
The altimeter can “measure glacier height, sea ice, forests, lakes and more, and helps scientists monitor changing ice sheets in Arctic and Antarctica regions,” the New Scientist wrote on Facebook.
Earlier in January, another eerie sight was spotted in the night sky over Hawaii. A mysterious whirlpool-shaped blue light hovered among the stars, caused by the launch of a new Space X satellite, McClatchy News previously reported.
This story was originally published February 1, 2023 at 3:11 PM with the headline "Bizarre curtain of lights floats across Hawaii night sky. What caused dazzling display?."
