In: Photo: Northern Lights. Perhaps people watched it.
Residents of Volgograd last night could see an unusual picture in the sky - vertical stripes of reddish-gray color that appeared more distinctly, then became paler. According to eyewitnesses living in the Kirovsky district of the city, they observed the glow in the sky around midnight on February 28
“The stripes were parallel to each other, in the western part of the sky there were three or four of them of different lengths, in the south there were more - about 7-10,” says Anna Vershinina, a witness to the unusual phenomenon. - They looked like pillars of dim light that appeared in the sky, then turned pale, and after five minutes they disappeared altogether. Then for some time from the window one could see a cluster of the same stripes, but rather white than red, in the southern side of the sky.
“I went outside to smoke in the evening and thought it was either the northern lights or a UFO,” says another eyewitness, Maxim Eremenko. - The light looked like the beams of searchlights, but the stripes were wide, not too clear and did not reach the horizon, but seemed to hang in the sky. It reminded me of a scene from "War of the Worlds" when aliens wanted to take over the Earth."
Some eyewitnesses claim that similar streaks of light were visible in the sky several days ago.
As reported in the Volgograd Planetarium, today several calls were received, mainly from residents of the southern districts of the city. People described what they saw in almost the same way.
According to the planetarium lecturer Olga Kolesnikova, judging by the stories of the callers, it can be assumed that an astronomical phenomenon, rare for our latitudes, was observed in the sky over Volgograd - the aurora.
“We do not yet have official confirmation of this, but if calls from eyewitnesses continue to come, and experts can observe this phenomenon, then it will already be possible to draw certain conclusions,” Olga Kolesnikova said.
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She also added that the polar, or, as it is also called, "northern lights", quite rare for our latitudes, had already been observed in Volgograd - such facts were noted in 1957 and 1958.
“This can be easily explained by the increase in solar activity, which is currently observed. After all, it is the solar wind that fills the upper layers of the atmosphere with its charged particles, as a result we can see the glow, which is called the aurora,”Olga Kolesnikova said.
By the way, scientists know the facts when the aurora appeared in the sky not only beyond the Arctic Circle, but also in Moscow, Moscow region, Crimea and a number of European countries.