{"id":279377,"date":"2026-05-21T12:02:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-21T12:02:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/279377\/"},"modified":"2026-05-21T12:02:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T12:02:08","slug":"did-you-see-the-strange-cloud-over-tampa-bay-this-morning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/279377\/","title":{"rendered":"Did you see the strange cloud over Tampa Bay this morning?"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you looked up in the early morning, a strangely-shaped cloud could be seen after it was formed by SpaceX’s early morning launch from Cape Canaveral.<\/p>\n

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. \u2014 Did you notice a unique cloud hovering over the Tampa Bay area Thursday morning?<\/p>\n

If you looked to the sky at sunrise around 6 a.m., a strangely-shaped cloud, otherwise called a noctilucent cloud, could be seen after it was formed by SpaceX’s early morning launch<\/a> from Cape Canaveral.<\/p>\n

10 Tampa Bay News Meteorologist Courteney Jacobazzi explains a noctilucent cloud is formed when a rocket launches around sunrise, causing the exhaust to be illuminated from the sun’s early rays.<\/p>\n

“That exhaust freezes in the upper atmosphere because it’s very cold up there,” she said. “As it comes up it refracts the light through those ice crystals and get that neon-blue color that make them look so beautiful.”<\/p>\n

The unique, jellyfish-looking shape of the cloud is due to how fluid Earth’s atmosphere is, causing it to morph into different shapes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you looked up in the early morning, a strangely-shaped cloud could be seen after it was formed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":279378,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[135,137,136],"class_list":["post-279377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa","tag-tampa","tag-tampa-headlines","tag-tampa-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279377\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}