One of my friends woke up to an odd sight: strange lights in the sky. His early morning twitter noise wanted to know if anyone else was seeing the aurora borealis near Barrie (actually over a place called Utopia).

Well, it’s not impossible.

Experience led me to think it wasn’t the northern lights, but something else. I tweeted back, and sadly I was right.

You see, one morning I too saw lights in the sky over Ottawa. To wax poetic, it was like hundreds of candles stretched up to sky and merged into a greenish-red glow spilt across the horizon.

Unaccustomed to the sight, I declared “Northern Lights” on twitter, facebook, everywhere, to anyone who would listen.

That evening’s weather report gave me a bit of a smack down. Turns out, the kind meteorologist said, it was in fact an instance of what is called light pillars.

Light pillars are caused by regular man-made light that is reflected by moisture in the air in odd ways. When a lot of pillars are close together they can look, to a hopeful eye, like the northern lights.

Eerie, true, but, ionosphere fireworks it is not. I was crestfallen when I learned the truth. Plus, I’d left a social media trail that forced me to confess my mistake.

My friend, too, soon tweeted back, his words a little heavy: he was seeing light pillars, too.

That is a mistaken sky phenomenon reference bomb, times two… bam…

Further Reading:

Ottawa Citizen report

Some of the science explained

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