Amazing Sky by Alan Dyer

This is the odd sight of an arc of light across the sky created by the high-altitude fuel dump from an orbiting rocket. It looks like a huge comet or an odd auroral arc.

In this case it was from the upper stage of a Chang Zheng 6A rocket launched from China just 3 hours earlier that was placing three Yaogan satellites into polar orbit. The rocket was in a 797 x 810 km orbit at 86° inclination, so nearly polar. The fuel dump was performed either before the upper stage re-entered or, if it was remaning in orbit, to prevent it eventually exploding to prevent more space debris from being added to low Earth orbit.

This is what it looked like to the eye. It appeared first much higher across the east, but the whole arc was moving from south to north. By the time I got the camera ready and aimed, the arc had moved into the northern sky, here to the right of the Big Dipper. This was from home in southern Alberta, but the rocket orbit was passing over Saskatchewan to the east.

This is a single exposure with the Canon R6 and Venus Optics 15mm lens.