What was that? Light pillars in the winter night

4 min read

Motionless beams of light reaching into the sky look as if a spaceship were shining down on the ground. In reality, tiny ice crystals floating in the freezing air reflect the light of lamps on the ground. They occur regularly in Hungary too, most recently last January over Lake Balaton.

On the night of January 27, 2026, a vivid pink light lit up the clouds over the western basin of Lake Balaton. It was clearly visible even from the high bluff at Balatonakarattya. Near Fonyód, a strong light source created a spectacular light pillar that glowed in the sky for hours. According to Időkép, it was not an aurora: flat ice crystals floating in the clouds drifting over the lake created ideal conditions for the phenomenon. Light pillars also appeared elsewhere around the lake, only fainter.

This was not the first such case. In January 2021 they were photographed around Velence and Székesfehérvár, and they formed because of the hard frost, when the air cooled below minus 5 degrees in many places. At Lake Balaton, as many as a dozen pillars could be seen at that time, and in Fonyód and on Hajag Hill Időkép's night-vision webcams also filmed the "forest of pillars." A Hungarian image taken near Kaposvár even made it into the international atmospheric optics literature.

How does it form?

The light pillar belongs to the family of halo phenomena, meaning it arises from the interaction of ice crystals and light. The main players are flat, hexagonal ice crystals that settle into a roughly horizontal position as they fall. In very cold weather, these crystals can also float near the ground. This is called diamond dust.

The horizontal faces of the crystals act as tiny mirrors: they reflect the light of lamps on the ground toward the observer's eye. Together they create the appearance of a continuous, vertical rod of light.

It is important to know that there is actually no beam of light above the lamp. What we see is light reflected from crystals floating between the observer and the light source, a kind of apparent image. The crystals are roughly halfway between us and the lamps. That is why the light pillar is not located at any specific place in the sky.

Pillars created by artificial lights can be much taller than their natural counterparts seen above the Sun or the Moon. The light rays from lamps are not parallel, so even slightly tilted crystals reflect the light downward, toward our eyes.

When can we expect it?

Light pillars are most often visible in very cold, calm weather, when most of the flat crystals are aligned parallel to the ground. If the wind picks up, the crystals tumble every which way and the pillars disappear. In the north, for example in Finland, they typically appear at around minus 20 degrees or colder. Here, freezing, humid, calm winter nights are the most suitable.

The color depends on the light source. The pillar takes on the color of the lamp that illuminates it: orange above sodium lamps, white or bluish above LED street lighting. The pink pillar at Lake Balaton also came from a strong ground-based light source of that color. The reports do not say exactly what it was.

It also occurs with the Sun: this is the sun pillar. With flat crystals, the Sun must be no more than 6 degrees above the horizon, meaning it is visible around sunrise or sunset.

Why do people mistake it for a UFO?

Because it looks exactly like the "beam of light" projected down from a spaceship in the movies. At Niagara Falls in the U.S., for example, they cause many UFO reports: there, the mist from the falling water and the city's upward-pointing spotlights together create the light pillars. When such pillars appeared over Oslo, the Norwegian Meteorological Institute also noted that upward-reaching light pillars and downward-reaching sun pillars are often suspected to be behind mistaken UFO sightings.

How to recognize it

It is perfectly vertical and does not move.
It always appears above a light source on the ground, such as a city, sports field, greenhouse or industrial facility.
It is visible only on freezing, calm nights, often in foggy, humid air.
If you walk a little way off, the pillar "comes with you," because the image reflected from the crystals depends on your viewpoint.
It quickly disappears when the wind picks up or the weather turns milder.

The sober take

A light pillar is not an object, nor is it a real beam of light. It is an optical phenomenon: horizontally aligned ice crystals floating in the air reflect the light of lamps on the ground like millions of tiny mirrors. That is why it always appears above a light source, is motionless, matches the color of the lamp, and is visible only in cold, calm weather. If in winter you see vertical rods of light above a city, sports field or greenhouse, you are almost certainly looking at a light pillar. Atmospheric optics has known and documented the phenomenon well for decades, and it occurs in Hungary in nearly every harsh winter.