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I wonder, the article says it's been visible for decades by photographers. We could correlate the time the photos are taken with rocket launches.

Also, there is no wikipedia page about this phenomena yet.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_(atmospheric_phenomenon)

Rather than being an individual launch, I'm wondering if the exhaust from transfers (from LEO to other orbits) leave gases in their own orbit, and if a particular transfer is happening a lot, the gasses would accumulate in their own distinct orbit.

Context: I worked on a satellite that observed interesting phenomenon that appeared in low-visible-light around the Earth, and one of the things we picked up as noise was the gas from a spy satellite doing a transfer near the Earth-Sun line of sight.

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