I like reading and writing these science pieces for you after a hard day of high school teaching. Usually I am a little drunk while doing so, the only thing that can relax me enough to get some sleep to face the next day of teaching torture, rampaging rude students, no interest in science and maths, but plenty of interest in drugs, even though chemistry is needed to synthesise their treasures. I particularly rejoice in science geeks stumbling across stuff that they cannot yet explain. I know that this upsets them, and stresses them almost to the same level I get teaching in the multicult:
https://www.livescience.com/63385-steve-not-aurora-mystery-phenomenon.html?utm_source=ls-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20180821-ls
“Late at night on July 25, 2016, a thin river of purple light slashed through the skies of northern Canada in an arc that seemed to stretch hundreds of miles into space. It was a magnificent, mysterious, borderline-miraculous sight, and the group of citizen skywatchers who witnessed it decided to give the phenomenon a fittingly majestic name: “Steve.” Given its coincidence with the northern lights, Steve was just thought to be part of the aurora — the shimmering sheets of nighttime color that appear in the sky when charged plasma particles streak out of the sun, sail across space on solar winds and jolt down Earth’s magnetic field toward the planet’s poles. However, a new study published today (Aug. 20) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters suggests that such a simple explanation might not apply. [Aurora Images: See Breathtaking Views of the Northern Lights] According to researchers at the University of Calgary in Canada and the University of California, Los Angeles, Steve does not contain the telltale traces of charged particles blasting through Earth’s atmosphere that auroras do. Steve, therefore, is not an aurora at all, but something entirely different: a mysterious, largely unexplained phenomenon that the researchers have dubbed a “sky glow.”
No doubt some physics team will crack this one at some point, but the example does show that there are still things that ordinary peole can observe, that stump the physics geeks, if only for a time.