We were driving back through the -20°c air from a fantastic day skiing in Vemdalen when we were met with the incredible sight in the above grainy phone photos I took from the car. Incredibly bright and vibrantly coloured pillars with beautiful symmetry beaming up into the sky! What we were seeing was a town's lights reflected in ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere, creating light pillars. When we got home, the pillars weren't nearly as amazing but I drove out to an industrial estate to get some pictures with my DSLR, which you can see above. Disappointed I wasn't able to get a good photo of the view I'd seen from the car, I headed home to wind down. Later in the evening, I just happened to look out of the window and notice a sky full of glorious pillars, cut off just above the tree line, making them look like they were hanging in the sky. The alien-like spectacle was too incredible to miss so I headed out into the garden with the camera to get some shots, and I managed to take the first image from a panorama of 3 photos, and a mandatory selfie, where you can see I had no hat or gloves despite the -22°c. I was just too blown away to worry about that.
The reason behind the pillars was a substance in the air, referred to as Diamond Dust. Diamond Dust is actually suspended ice crystals, plate-like and hexagonal in nature, which fall very gently through the air as a form of cloudless precipitation. As they fall flat, they act as lots of tiny mirrors, reflecting light beneath them, creating the illusion of a pillar. The same principle is responsible for sun pillars in cirrus clouds. The diamond dust was intermittently replaced and mixed with supercooled freezing fog, which caused the pillars to disappear and the visibility to drop (by my observations). I suspect diamond dust is essentially fog that has got so cold that the droplets have frozen to ice crystals. These crystals fell through the air and delicately settled on the cars. Most of the precipitation in parts of Antarctica is suggested to be from Diamond Dust! You could see it sparkling in the air under streetlights etc and in this video I took with my phone when I got home, you can see the ice crystals up close falling past the lens:
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