A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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STEVE
STEVE is a narrow ribbon of mauve and white light that appears in the sky at lower latitudes than the aurora, running roughly east to west and sometimes accompanied by a green picket fence of vertical rays alongside it. It is not an aurora. It is produced by a river of extremely hot ionized gas flowing westward through the upper atmosphere at several kilometers a second, and it lasts twenty minutes to an hour.
Etymology
The name began as a joke. Amateur aurora photographers in Alberta had been recording the ribbon for years without knowing what it was and started calling it Steve, after a scene in the animated film Over the Hedge in which a group of animals name an unfamiliar thing Steve to make it less frightening. When researchers took the phenomenon up in 2016, they kept the name and built an acronym to fit it: Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement.
Notes
This is one of the clearer cases of amateur observation producing a scientific discovery. The Alberta Aurora Chasers had thousands of photographs and precise times, which allowed the researchers to match sightings against satellite passes and identify what was happening at altitude. The green picket fence has since been shown to have a different cause from the mauve ribbon itself, and neither is fully explained.