A blue swirl in the hypnotic sky of Alaska. what was;

The northern lights in Alaska got even more surreal Saturday with a bright blue spiral appearing that stretches across the sky like a galaxy.

But no, it wasn’t a portal to another dimension, it was just excess fuel dumped from a SpaceX rocket that lifted off from California three hours earlier.

Dumping fuel isn’t an uncommon practice, space physicist Don Hampton of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks told The Associated Press.

“When it happens at high altitude, the fuel turns into ice crystals. And if you happen to be in sunlight, and you’re in the dark on Earth, it appears as a huge cloud, sometimes in the shape of a spiral.

The SpaceX rocket, which launched Friday night to carry 25 satellites into orbit, headed north and was visible from most of Alaska.

A similar spiral was seen from a SpaceX rocket carrying a GPS satellite in January over the Big Island of Hawaii.