Set Your Alarms!

Colorful clouds to dot East Coast skies after NASA rocket launch on Sunday

Red, blue and green clouds will dot skies across the East Coast on Sunday evening following a NASA rocket launch in Virginia.

Between 9:04 and 9:19 p.m., a sounding rocket will take off from the Wallops Flight Facility releasing colorful vapor clouds roughly 100 miles above the earth.

Known as “vapor tracers”, the harmless clouds are formed by an interaction between barium, strontium and cupric-oxide.

Cast out between six and 12 miles, the clouds will help NASA scientists on the ground to track particle motions in space.

If the weather-dependent launch goes ahead, sky gazers living from New York to North Carolina will be able to spot the colorful clouds.