Light clouds, the rarest clouds in the world, appeared over the San Francisco Bay Area during the early hours of Friday morning, just days after another SpaceX rocket launch.

Local photographer Ryan Hayes captured the clouds sailing over Lake Merritt in Auckland two days ago at around 6.30am before sharing pictures of the rare sighting later on social media.

“A strange bright cloud over Lake Merritt during the tail end of astronomical twilight this morning,” he wrote. “Awesome shot of what appears to be nocturnal cloud over the San Francisco Bay Area this morning!” UCLA climatologist Daniel Swain said in response to Hayes’ image. ” These clouds are very rare at this latitude and also in winter, and are the highest and driest clouds on Earth, forming in the atmosphere at an altitude of 50 miles.”

The National Weather Service eventually confirmed that nocturnal clouds were in the Bay Area before sunrise, that their passage was somewhat unusual, and

Noctilucent clouds are usually found only at the edges of the Earth: the North and South poles, and in the United States, they usually appear on the West Coast and only in the Pacific Northwest, also called arctic clouds, noctilucent clouds form between 47-53 miles above the Earth’s surface (76 -85 km), according to NASA.