With the eyes turned to the heavens, the Stargazers who were in the Perseid meteoritic rain on Tuesday night witnessed something out of this world.
In a publication on Facebook, the astrolab du Parc du Mont-Mégantic in the municipalities of the East of Quebec described it as “a magnificent and bright spiral that crosses the sky around 10:40 pm”
Several people in the Montreal area also witnessed the strange phenomenon and approached CBC News that describes a bright light wrapped by a diffuse halo and warning of an UFO sighting.
While it was certainly unusual, it was not 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 that turned on its engine to exorbit itself after having launched the European satellite-SGA1 satellite in a polar orbit,” the Facebook publication explained.
The European Space Agency confirmed on its website that a meteorological satellite was launched on Tuesday night at 9:37 pm local time, from the European Space Puerto in Kouroou, French Guayana, a department abroad from France located in South America.
The new satellite is intended to mark “a new era of climate and climatic monitoring of the polar orbit.”
According to astrophysicist Robert Lamontagne, the orbit of the rocket is what allowed the show to be visible in Quebec.
Most of the time rocket launches are found in an equatorial orbit and, therefore, they will look close to Ecuador, he said.
In a polar orbit, the rocket has to surround the earth surrounding each planet’s pole.
“Then, the trajectory of that, the rocket did so that from our latitude could be seen in Montreal or in the south of Quebec,” he said.
But to witness the phenomena, other factors must also be aligned, according to Lamontagne, including the launch time and the altitude achieved by the rocket.
“From our point of view, we were in the dark, the sun was low under the horizon, but the rocket itself was so high that it was still illuminated by the sun,” he said.
And when the second stage of the rocket again entered the atmosphere of the earth, he said: “I was turning a little, there were escape gases coming out of it and that is what people saw in heaven.”
A spokesman for the Canadian space agency told CBC News that many observers captured the event of the event, and the agency confirmed that it was the Ariane 6 rocket of ESA.
