Around 7.25 pm, Alasdair Burns, a star guide on Stewart / Rakiura Island, received a message from a friend: go out and look at the sky. “Once we got out, it was very obvious what he was talking about,” Burns said. He saw a huge, blue spiral of light in the darkness. “It was like a huge spiral galaxy, just hanging in the sky and slowly drifting away,” Burns said. “Quite an eerie feeling.” Burns took some pictures of the lights in a long exposure, recording the spiral from his phone. “We quickly knocked on the doors of all our neighbors to get them out as well. And so there were about five of us, all out on our shared terrace and we were looking up and a little bit, so we got a little scared. “ Social media groups watching the country’s stars and amateur astronomy lit up with people posting photos and asking questions about the phenomenon, which was visible from most of the South Island. Theories abounded – from UFOs to alien rockets to light trade shows. “A premonition from our orbital black hole,” said an asteroid. “Aliens again,” another commented. The reality was probably a little more petty, said Professor Richard Easther, a physicist at the University of Auckland, who described the phenomenon as “strange but easy to explain”. Clouds of this nature sometimes appeared when a rocket carried a satellite into orbit, he said. “When the propellant is launched from the back, you have what is essentially water and carbon dioxide – which briefly forms a cloud in space when illuminated by the sun,” Easther said. “The geometry of the satellite orbit and also the way we sit in relation to the sun – this combination of things was the right thing to do to create these completely strange clouds that were visible from the South Island.” Easther said the rocket was most likely the Globalstar launch from SpaceX, which the company sent into low-Earth orbit off Cape Canaveral in Florida on Sunday. Burns had speculated that the spiral was most likely a rocket, having read of a similar phenomenon in 2009, when a Russian rocket launch sparked huge blue spirals over Norway. Even knowing the possible source, he said, was a confrontational spectacle. “None of us have ever seen anything like it. It was spectacular. “