Eerie clouds track near-space winds

I have a vivid memory from my early years of standing in the parking lot of a bowling center in Rocky Mount with my dad and a large group milling around at the end of the evening about to head home when suddenly, glowing greenish-blue blue and red orbs began spreading silently in the sky above us.

The whole process brought a lot of excitement and maybe a little fear, as no one there knew quite what we were witnessing (this was, after all, in the midst of the Cold War and a pretty decent period of "UFO" interest). A couple of days later, the mystery was solved as phone calls to emergency authorities about this apparition resulted in a newspaper article explaining that it was a NASA sounding rocket releasing materials to study the upper atmosphere.

Jump ahead about 15 years to the early 1980s, when I was an Air Force Wing Weather Officer and heard through work channels that a similar launch was planned for an upcoming weekend morning, while I was on a visit home. I set the camera out on a tripod and caught a few photos, one of which you see here. It was a lot of fun to watch and photograph, although some of the intrigue of that childhood encounter was missing, since I knew this time what was actually going on up there.

So if you see strange spreading or expanding colored clouds high overhead sometime, usually not too long before sunrise or after sunset, there may be one of these missions underway. If so, enjoy! It's a neat thing to observe, and contributes to our understanding of the near-space atmosphere!