Recently, when a photographer photographed the night sky star orbit in the Kanas scenic spot deep in the Altay Mountains in Xinjiang, he accidentally noticed a fantastic halo in the cold night sky - above the primeval forest, a cluster of beautiful arcs of light glowed under the night sky, making the cold night in the northern Xinjiang mountains look particularly fantastic.
What is this phenomenon? Some netizens have to ask: Is this an aurora? Has the aurora already come to the night sky in northern Xinjiang, China? Generally speaking, the most likely place to see the aurora in China is the mohe river at the northernmost point of Heilongjiang, but even if it is a mohe river, the number of auroras observed in the mohe river in China is also very small, and in many years it is even impossible to see the aurora, and the altay region in northern Xinjiang with lower latitude is even less likely to see the aurora. The fantastic halo captured by the photographer in the Kanas scenic spot this time is another special phenomenon - "cold night light column".
Cold night light pillar in Kanas, Xinjiang, picture from China News Network
"Cold night light column" mostly occurs in cold areas on winter nights, its appearance is the atmosphere to do the "lighting engineer" - in the cold night, the atmospheric temperature is low enough and the humidity is relatively large, first of all, the air near the ground will be quickly frozen into a large number of suspended ice crystals, sometimes even ice mist, and when there is an appropriate scale of wind or turbulence disturbance caused by the change in the attitude of the ice crystals, it can be like millions of miniature mirrors like refracting light, and finally the human lights on the ground will rise into the sky, forming an Optimus Prime, reflecting the night sky. In contrast, auroras on Earth are luminous phenomena caused by charged, energetic particles from the magnetosphere and solar wind being guided into the Earth's atmosphere by the geomagnetic field and colliding with atoms in the upper atmosphere, which are two completely different natural phenomena.
Therefore, the pillar of light seen by the human eye is actually a virtual image formed by reflection. For the cold night light column captured by photographers in kanas scenic spot recently, it is the ice crystals in the night sky that reflect the lights of Kanas Village, forming a fantastic light illusion in the night sky. It is now January, and many places in China are entering the coldest time of the year, and northern Xinjiang is no exception. For example, monitoring data from the early morning of January 11 showed that the temperature in parts of northern Xinjiang was below -30 degrees. In this case, a large number of ice crystals appear in the atmosphere, and just the right amount of reflected light forms a fantastic halo in the night sky.
In other particularly cold places in China, this strange phenomenon also occasionally appears, such as in Inner Mongolia, Qinghai, Heilongjiang and other places, there are also reports of cold night light pillars in winter. In November 2021, there were also netizens in Harbin, Heilongjiang, who recorded the pillar of light in the night, which is also a pillar of cold night light.
The cold night light pillar recorded by Harbin netizens on November 25 came from Weibo netizen @He Shucong