Why SpaceX's dawn launches paint a glowing 'jellyfish' across the sky
What happened? Before sunrise on Tuesday 13 October 2026, a SpaceXDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 6:33am ET, carrying a Dragon cargo spacecraft with supplies for the International Space Station. Its exhaust spread into a glowing, tentacled "space jellyfish" seen from Florida up to the Carolinas and Virginia, with EarthSky reporting it visible from as far as 1,290 km away.
Why it happens: It comes down to timing. The launch was about 48 minutes before sunrise, so people on the ground were still in darkness while the rocket had already climbed high enough to be in sunlight. Up there the air is close to a vacuum, so the exhaust gases and water vapour expand fast into a wide, rounded cloud. Some of that freezes into ice crystals that scatter sunlight, and the trailing exhaust forms the "tentacles". The same launch at midday would barely stand out against a bright sky.
Why you see it more now: The effect isn't new. Soviet launches from Plesetsk caused famous twilight "UFO" sightings as early as 1977. But SpaceX now launches so often, with plenty of dawn and dusk windows, that more people catch it, and they have phone cameras in their pockets. Whether you can see it from far away also depends on the trajectory: launches heading northeast up the US coast carry the plume into view for much of the East Coast.
Photo: A SpaceX Falcon 9 carrying SAOCOM 1A at twilight from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, 7 October 2018. U.S. Air Force photo by Michael Peterson (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Sources: EarthSky, The Weather Channel, The Guardian, WRAL, Chernouss et al., Geophysica (2012), and the discussion on X.
