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Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. But pink sky?
Thanks to clouds over Docklands on Sunday night and Monday night, it’s been impossible for Melburnians to avoid witnessing a mysterious, Bat Signal-esque pink glow in the sky.
One misguided tourist wrote on social media: “The Aurora Australis put on a breathtaking show, painting the sky in shades of pink and violet right over the water.”
Residents in the city’s high-rise buildings were treated to high-definition widescreen views of the phenomenon, with the pink clouds filling their entire field of vision.
“It’s a girl!” and “Martians firing their death rays” were among the explanations on Reddit.
It turns out Marvel Stadium, owned by the AFL, is the source of the eerie glow. The league took advantage of last week’s Gather Round – and consequently no matches in Melbourne – to rejuvenate the ground’s hard-used turf with LED light. The lights will be back on Tuesday night, so if it’s cloudy, the city should again be suffused in a soft pink glow.
One photo on Reddit shows Marvel glowing pink on Monday night, the light leaking into the sky above.
Magenta LED lights are a common tool for pitches at major sports stadiums: “The combination of red and blue light, which creates the pink glow we see, promotes healthy growth in plants that may not be getting enough sunlight,” according to the College of Wooster in the US state of Ohio.
Pink lights were first used at an Australian sports stadium at Allianz Stadium in Sydney in 2024.
“It was found that the plants only need about 5 per cent of blue light to start and kick off photosynthesis, and red light to come in and help with the growth,” Allianz curator Adam Lewis said at the time.
Melbourne is not the only city to be perplexed by pink skies.
In January, the British city of Birmingham was bathed in magenta light when staff at soccer stadium St Andrew’s deployed the same LEDs to the ground’s turf in the middle of a snowy winter.
In 2022, a medicinal cannabis facility in Mildura, in north-west Victoria, accidentally gave away the location of its secret greenhouses when it left open the blackout blinds, allowing the pink glow to escape to the cloudy sky above like a giant “it’s over here” sign.
And a year before that, residents of Horsham, three hours’ south, received the same spectacle when the town’s grain research park activated its new quarantine facility for crops.
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