Is it time for “Independence Day 3” already?

A photographer southeast of Fairbanks, Alaska captured an unusual phenomenon in the night skies early Saturday — a stunning and bright spiral that was surrounded by the aurora of the northern lights.

But there was something eerily different about the sudden spacial centerpiece. It was moving.

“It got bigger and bigger,” photographer Todd Salat told the Anchorage Daily News, adding that the “beautiful piece of art in the sky” was just about directly overhead five minutes later.

“I had absolutely no idea what it was … I would say this was maybe the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Hundreds of miles northeast in the remote Arctic community of Kotzebue, midwife Elizabeth Withnall had seen something similar.

“We get a lot of very unusual phenomenon in the sky in the far north,” Withnall told the outlet.

“I’ve seen fog bows, and rainbows around the moon. So I just thought, ‘this is some weird thing in the sky, and I don’t know what it is, but it’s pretty cool.’ ”

It turns out that “weird thing” was man-made and “appears to be rocket engine exhaust from a SpaceX Transporter-7 mission that launched on the Falcon 9 about three hours earlier in California,” according to Don Hampton, a professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute.

The mission launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base north of Los Angeles just before midnight Friday.

The reusable Falcon 9, a two-stage booster rocket, completed a “rideshare program mission” where 51 other spacecrafts were stored.

“Water vapor in the exhaust from the second stage engine freezes and catches high-altitude sunlight, effectively glowing and creating this spiral galaxy of a display…it did this pass-by over Alaska, stunning many night-watchers,” Hampton told the News over email.

Although the logical explanation was sure to calm many in the true north, it seems the two local photographers enjoyed being caught up in the sudden phenomenon.

“Trust me, at first, I was totally bewildered… and I kind of enjoyed that feeling of the unknown,” Salat wrote on Facebook.

“Seriously Elon? You gotta ruin my aurora? I was hoping a spaceship would land and aliens would hop out,” Withnall posted.