‘Nature’s Beauty’: Stunning light columns illuminate the night sky over Nebraska due to a strange optical illusion
- Water expert Bill Taylor lifted the wonder above North Platte
- The light columns can be seen in calm conditions when ice crystals float in the air
- Acting as thousands of mirrors, the crystals reflect light as from lamps
- To the viewer, the light appears to be coming from a line above the actual source
- This is similar to how objects look like from behind a mirror
- However, the small, parallel, tiny mirrors extend the shadow of the lamps.
Stunning ‘light columns’ were seen illuminating the night sky over Nebraska earlier in the week as ice cubes floated in the air that still created a strange visual scene.
Water expert Bill Taylor captured dozens of strangely polished columns while out walking in the city of North Platte on Monday, Feb. 8.
The columns are formed when light exposes thousands of tiny ice crystals at different heights in the atmosphere – creating a long, meaningful light source.
Light columns were also seen elsewhere in the northern U.S. this week – such as in northern Michigan – and may appear into the weekend.
Stunning ‘light columns’ were seen illuminating the night sky over Nebraska earlier in the week as ice fragments floated in the air that still created a strange visual scene.
‘It was almost like I was looking at the northern lights because they were kicking, moving and changing in appearance,’ said Mr Taylor, who works for the National Weather Service. SA, to CNN.
Light columns are formed when rays of light – whether from a street lamp, the sun or the moon – are exposed from ice crystals that are attached horizontally in the sky or fall slowly. through the sky, which together act as a series of tiny mirrors in the sky.
While the light is coming from the ground level (as you say, say, street lights), or higher in the sky (for light from the sun or the moon), viewers seem to be ‘comes from different places in the sky above / below the true source, forming the’ pillar of light ‘.
The columns do not exist physically – they are a visual object and a kind of hello – and they come from the same way in which meaningful images of objects seen in mirrors can be seen behind the plane of the mirror.
‘The higher the crystals in the atmosphere, the higher the column,’ a spokesman for the National Weather Service in La Crosse, Wisconsin told CNN.
Special conditions are required for the formation of light columns – it must be frozen, and the air must be virtually windless.
Without this, the tiny hexagonal ice crystals would be disturbed, but in very calm conditions, they naturally conduct themselves horizontally as they fall through the air.
It is the presence of the flat crystals over different heights that causes the reflection of the light source to grow far into a column.
Light columns are usually found in colder climates in autumn and winter, when the temperature is low enough to form ice in the atmosphere – usually when temperatures fall to ground level below 10 ° F. (-12 ° C).
The temperature dropped to -20 ° F. [-29°C] the night these photos were taken in North Platte, the coldest we’ve seen since March 2019, ’meteorologist Darren Snively from the National Weather Service told CNN.
With arctic air pushing further across North America this week, it looks like more people in the U.S. will be able to see light columns for themselves.
In particular, meteorologists are forecasting highs below 0 ° F in Minnesota, Montana and North Dakota for the remainder of this week.
‘The latest model guidance continues to show that arctic air mass will take control of the northern and central regions of the country into this weekend,’ said a spokesperson for the Prediction Center National Weather Service Weather with CNN.
The weather is controlled, they explained, by the influence of a slow-moving polar vortex based on Canadian prairies. ‘