I saw it once, it was pretty eerie at first but then I remembered "oh yeah, we have a giant lab floating up there". It moves a bit faster than a plane does. It was only lit up for a moment and was gone.
Also, the images aren't "rotated 90 degrees to the right". They're "oriented to the west".
That we make North the top of our maps is simply arbitrary. We used to make the top of our maps the east because that is where the sun rises.