Marvel Stadium confirmed as the source of mysterious glow
Updated ,first published
Red skies at night are sailors’ delight. What about pink skies?
It was almost impossible for Melburnians to avoid witnessing a mysterious, Bat-Signal-like pink glow in the sky.
One misguided tourist wrote on social media: “Aurora Australis put on a breathtaking show, painting the sky over the water in shades of pink and purple.”
Residents of the city’s high-rise buildings saw high-definition widescreen images of the phenomenon, with pink clouds filling their entire field of vision.
“It’s a girl!” and “Martians firing death rays” were also among the statements on Reddit.
Marvel Stadium, owned by the AFL, was revealed to be the source of the eerie glow. The league is rejuvenating the ground’s heavily used grass with LED lights.
A photo on Reddit shows Marvel glowing pink and the light leaking into the sky above.
Magenta LED lights a shared vehicle for fields in major sports stadiums: “The combination of red and blue light that creates the pink glow we see promotes healthy growth in plants that do not receive enough sunlight,” according to the College of Wooster in Ohio, USA.
Pink lights were first used at an Australian sports stadium in 2024 at Allianz Stadium in Sydney.
“It turns out that plants only need about 5 percent blue light to initiate and initiate photosynthesis and red light to help break in and grow,” Allianz curator Adam Lewis said at the time.
Melbourne isn’t the only city stunned by pink skies.
British city in January Birmingham bathed in lavender lightWhen staff at St Andrew’s football stadium installed the same LEDs on the pitch grass in the middle of a snowy winter.
in 2022 Medical marijuana facility in MilduraIn northwestern Victoria, she accidentally revealed the location of their secret greenhouse when she left the blackout curtains open, allowing the pink glow to escape into the cloudy sky above like a giant “here” sign.
And a year ago, residents of Horsham, three hours south, experienced the same scene when the town’s grain research park launched its new quarantine facility for crops.
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