The Ribbon Called Steve: How Amateur Sky-Watchers Named a Light Science Had Missed

2026-07-31 · Nature Defying Explanation · 7 min read

On a cold, clear night in the winter of 2015, a small cluster of photographers stood in the dark somewhere across the Canadian province of Alberta, tripods planted in the snow, waiting for the northern lights. What rose above them was not the northern lights. Instead of the familiar green curtains rippling along the horizon, a thin ribbon of pale purple stretched straight across the sky from east to west, narrow and sharp-edged, like a scratch of light drawn with a ruler. It did not sway the way an aurora sways. It hung there, glowing mauve, sometimes fringed along its lower edge with a row of short green streaks that looked, to more than one observer, like a picket fence standing on end.

The photographers had seen it before. They had been shooting it for years, and they still had no idea what it was. They belonged to a Facebook group called the Alberta Aurora Chasers, a loose community of amateurs who drove out on freezing nights to hunt the sky. Among themselves they had taken to calling the strange purple arc "Steve," a deliberately silly, deliberately meaningless placeholder borrowed from the 2006 animated film Over the Hedge, in which the frightened animals give an unfamiliar object a harmless human name so it stops being scary. The joke stuck, and the images kept accumulating.

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