Last night the streetlights were all beaming straight up! They shone* light in all directions, of course, but each had a single strong beam that was going straight to the sky.
I’ve never seen this before in my life. It was really beautiful and surreal.
It was -25 Celsius last night, and there were clouds of icy fog hanging around. That would have something to do with it, but why would they shine straight up?
Does anyone have any explanations or theories?
Thank you very, very much in advance.
You probably saw a local variation on a sun pillar.
It’s not that the streetlamps produced a strong vertical beam of light, but that hexagonal plates of ice strongly reflected whatever light the lamps emitted along a vertical axis directly to your eye.
Some streetlamps do shine light upwards-- it’s a poor design because it wastes energy, but it’s always easier to see where the light goes when there’s ice or fog or something in the air to be illuminated by it.
Hello Squink,
I haven’t figured out fhow to send private messages… I ought to look into that.
I sent my pictures to EPOD and yesterday got an E-mail saying they’d post them in the next several weeks! Yay!
I’ve seen those before during quiet winter nights in Rochester, NY.
One bit of trivia: tiny plate-like ice crystals tend not to tumble as they fall; instead they lie horizontally. Individual snowflakes do the same. It’s as if the sky were full of billions of tiny horizontal mirrors.
Another effect produced by this phenomenon: the “subsun.” Sometimes when looking out of an airplane window you’ll see the reflection of the sun on bodies of water peeking from beneath a cloud layer… yet you’re flying over mountains and desert, and there are no bodies of water there. It’s those billions of horizontal ice crystals again.
