WALKER, Mich. — It was a cold Saturday night on the 13th around West Michigan. Temperatures dropped down into the low teens to single digits shortly after sundown, with winds that remained calm.
While this is less than ideal weather to be outside in, it was perfect weather for a phenomenon that looks almost alien in nature. This event was captured in a photo sent to us by John Patrick in Walker. Beams of light, stretching from the surface to the heavens above. What could they be?
The answer has nothing to do with space, and everything to do with weather. They're called light pillars and they need very specific conditions to form, conditions that we had in place on Saturday night.
Needed Conditions & Causation:
To get light pillars we need conditions that include calm winds and temperatures below 14 degrees.
These conditions will allow ice crystals to form into plate like structures. The low winds will allow these plates to fall horizontally toward the ground without tumbling or crashing into one another.
What happens next is an optical illusion.
These flat plates falling through the atmosphere act like tiny mirrors for the light on the ground. This ground light extends upward toward the plates and then reflects off the plates to your eye.
As the plates extend up into the sky this reflection happens at multiple levels but all the light is coming from the same source. This creates a vertical line of reflected surface light toward your eyes appearing to you as a beam or pillar of light.
These pillars are very photogenic and somewhat rare in occurrence, so be sure to snap a photo if you ever see them!
-- Meteorologist Michael Behrens
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