Between about 10:15 and 10:30 p.m. on May 5, 2026, people across central British Columbia looked up at a fuzzy, glowing blob drifting from north to south across the sky. In Prince George, Patsy Seymour filmed it on her phone. In her video, the glow seems to follow a small point of light, with a wispy haze trailing behind, all moving at the same speed.

The Weather Network worked out what it was. At 8:59 p.m. Pacific time, a SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base near Santa Maria, California, about 2,100 kilometers to the south, carrying 24 Starlink satellites. Roughly 75 to 90 minutes after launch, the rocket’s second stage dumps leftover fuel. That fuel freezes almost instantly into a cloud of ice crystals.

At that altitude the crystals were still catching sunlight, even though it was fully dark on the ground. The sunlit cloud glowed. The point of light was most likely the second stage itself, and the haze part of the same frozen cloud. Both the timing and the north-to-south track fit.

These “space jellyfish” and glowing spirals have become a regular sight across western North America as launch rates have climbed. Whether people see one depends on how the launch lines up with sunset.