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Meet Steve. He’s tall, colourful and photogenic, and up until recently, he’d been relatively anonymous.

Now Steve is a celestial rock star thanks to a group of amateur Alberta sky watchers who began documenting the breathtaking atmospheric phenomenon that sometimes appears in the northern lights, which now has astronomers taking notice.

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“We started shining a light on this a few years ago,” said Chris Ratzlaff, a professional photographer and administrator of the 8,000-strong Alberta Aurora watchers Facebook group.

“Nine times out of 10 it looks like an airplane’s contrail — it can easily go by and you might not see it.”

But thanks to the so-called citizen astronomers of Alberta Aurora Chasers, who began logging the sightings and producing stunning images of Steve — the moniker an homage to the children’s movie Over the Hedge, the same name given to an unexplainable object — it has gained the attention of University of Calgary astronomers, the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA.