On March 5th, 2024 at 2 A.M. this strange white spiral appeared in the nightskies
as seen from Gimsoy in the Lofoten islands , Norway.

It appeared low over the western horizon and was slowly moving from south to north and disappered behind the NW horizon.

This is a timelapse-slideshow of individual photographs.

What was it ?

Photographer Mrs. Bettina Begtoft , who lives in Switzerland , is on vacation in Norway to photograph the northern lights.

A friend of hers, space enthusiast and aurorahunter Olivier Staiger in Switzerland had learned that 3 hours earlier ( 22:05 U.T. on March 4th ) a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was going to be launched from Vandenberg Space Port Base in California, carrying a multi-sat smallsat cargo called Transporter 10 - and produce this phenomenon. The rocket would deploy 53 satellites for different clients. After deploy, during the 2nd orbit, SpaceX fires a de-orbit burn , and since the stage2 of the rocket was in rotation the resulting cloud would appear as a spiral, just like it did in april 2023 on a previous Transporter-7 ride-share mission when a spectacular spiral was observed in the skies of Alaska. Back then it was a surprise, and observers wondered what it was, but this time Olivier Staiger predicted it, and informed his friend Bettina Begtoft to keep an eye on the skies to the west around 2 A.M.

and indeed, the spiral appeared. It was also observed by aurorahunters in Iceland, and was also caught on various aurora-webcams streaming liveon Youtube , from Finland and Greenland.

Bettina Begtoft shot these images with a Nikon D750 digital camera and Sigma Art 20mm f/1.4 lens, then sent them to Olivier Staiger to edit this video timelapse animation, with authorisation to send them to Newsflare for commercial use.

This event is very rare to see, and usually is observed by people who are not aware of it, so it comes as a surprise. This time however it was possible to predict it and inform various astrophotographers and facebook groups.