The Japanese telescope perched atop Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii, captured video of a mysterious flying spiral in the night sky on January 18.
In the video, a small dot of light appears and slowly gets brighter and begins to dissipate in a spiral before getting smaller and disappearing.
The Subaru Telescope, operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, a research institute, tweeted from its English-language account about its discovery two days later and included a hypothesis about the cause of the mysterious eddy.
“The Subaru-Asahi Star Camera captured a mysterious flying spiral,” the tweet reads. “The spiral seems to be related to the launch of a new satellite by the SpaceX company.”
Here are the strange images captured by the Japanese telescope:
SpaceX launched the GPS III Space Vehicle 06 mission on Jan. 18 at 7:24 a.m. from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, according to its mission log. It was later that same day that the spiral was seen in the sky. On its website, SpaceX claims it was “the second launch and landing of this Falcon 9 first stage booster.”
According to The Washington Post, this is not the first time that Falcon 9 has produced a bright spiral in the sky.
A spiral was captured over Queenstown, New Zealand, in June. Another was seen in April, also over Hawaii. Both occurrences of the rotating light came after Falcon 9 rocket launches, the outlet reported.
The spirals are not the only formations captured after SpaceX launches. Last year, photographer Kyle Morgan of K. Morgan Art took a photograph of a “jellyfish cloud” left behind after a Falcon 9 launch.
“This morning’s Space X rocket launch going over 20,000 kilometers per hour at this stage,” he wrote alongside the image on Facebook. “Photo including the first booster drop landing in the gravitas deficit with Venus and Jupiter under the ‘jellyfish cloud.’”
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