2023-11-06 09:16:00
Magnificent photos, of a pink sky, taken in a sky over Tournai. Many of you have pressed our orange Alert Us button, thinking of the Northern Lights. But the explanation of the phenomenon is surprising….
It’s a unique spectacle, which was offered to the inhabitants of the Tournai region on Sunday evening. “Very intriguing sky light“, Leslie confided. “The sky is getting pinker and pinker” Lindsay was surprised. “The sky above my house turned blood red for 5 minutes. We don’t know what it was, but it was pretty scary.”Dylan also testified.
Other witnesses have put forward ideas to explain this phenomenon: “Could this be an aurora borealis phenomenon?“, “It would be an aurora borealis“. In Tournaisis, the sky was also fuchsia on Sunday evening. We also received numerous photos immortalizing this impressive celestial spectacle (below).
But, in reality, it was not an aurora borealis. The explanation of this strange phenomenon is, however, very Cartesian. It is a company from Tournai, a giant in tomato production, which is at the origin. The sky was colored pink because of the tomato greenhouses in Pecq. Last night, it was an oversight that led to this light: “Due to a problem, we were unable to close the shutter of the greenhouse roof. We are sorry.”
“The topic of bright red or pink lights in the sky has nothing to do with the Northern Lights, it’s about the reflection of red and blue LED lights from huge tomato greenhouses,” indicates Mike via the orange Alert us button. LED lights are actually used at night to promote the growth of this Walloon producer’s tomatoes.
The boss of the company “Greet Biesbrouck” gave an explanation to our colleagues from the public channel. An unexpected coincidence fueled the confusion on Sunday evening. According to Luc Coghe, screens normally prevent the light from the greenhouses from filtering outside at night. “But yesterday, we forgot to activate these screens. Which explains why the Tournaisis sky was illuminated,” indicates the boss of the company.
On the other hand, there were indeed northern lights observed in several places in Belgium, the Netherlands and France on Sunday evening, as evidenced by several photos shared on social networks. The space weather website Poollicht.be, for example, published on X (formerly Twitter) images of the Northern Lights seen in the municipality of Maldegem, in East Flanders. The meteorological site Noodweer Benelux, for its part, reported northern lights in the province of Limburg, as well as in the province of Antwerp. The sky was also adorned with bright and colorful veils in the south and central Netherlands.
The Northern Lights are created when electrically charged particles from the sun strike the upper layers of the Earth’s atmosphere at high speed. This phenomenon produces bands of pink and green lights.
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