Possible pellicle and top-off advice?

Hi all, first time trying to brew cider. Naturally I've quickly encountered my first problem:

3 days ago I racked 5 gallons of cider from primary fermentation bucket to carboy. This morning I awoke to find that what I thought was an innocuous collection of bubbles on the surface actually has a little milky-looking "icicle" hanging from it.



It's hard to see in the photo but is baaaarely visible under the right-hand bubble patch. It's maybe the size of a Tylenol pill. It almost looks like a mini version of a kombucha mother. The icicle under the surface is creating a slow but steady stream of small bubbles. Is this the beginning of a pellicle?

2 questions:
-I know now from the collected wisdom of these forums that I left too much headspace in the carboy. The space could fit maybe another eighth of a gallon, but I ran out of cider in the primary bucket. Any ideas on the best move here? Pump CO2 or inert gases into airspace? Rerack into smaller jugs? Just run with it?

-Any idea what that thing under the bubbles is? I have a feeling it's a bad thing!

Great forums here, I've learned so much from browsing that I feel way less ignorant than I actually am. Very empowering! ; )

 

Purge the headspace with c02 anytime you open to check it. Its hard to tell if that will be a pellicle as it could just be formation of c02. I have had many beers/ciders sit in a carboy for awhile as I forgot about them and I come back to what looks like the beginning of mold but really its just a bunch of c02 bubbles bunched together. Stir the carboy around and see if it disappears.

 

Hiya ch1m1changas, and welcome. Hard for me to imagine that a colony of bacteria that is visible to the eye would have grown in three days. What was your recipe and what was your protocol? Did you use wild yeast or did you inoculate the must with a lab grown strain of yeast? If the latter I gotta think that what you are seeing is simply the CO2 forming around a particle of fruit. If you used wild yeast then you could have introduced bacteria that the yeast might have worked with in some kind of symbiotic relationship... but an idea of your recipe and protocol will suggest how likely that possibility is.
But bottom line - you don't want to age any cider or wine in any container with head room. it is likely to become vinegar and not a "sour" cider...

 

Thanks for your responses -- this being my first time I took what ya might call the "poor man's" route:

-5 gallons of pasteurized, not-from-concentrate "apple juice" from Whole Foods
-Montrachet Red Star yeast, per suggestion of local home brew store
-pretty high ambient temperature for cider-making (77°F avg) so the SG dropped QUICK, from 1.050 on day 1 to 1.005 on day 6
-Cider was moved from primary to secondary on day 8. It's now day 12.

Sounds like it might be best to re-rack to smaller vessels and minimize head room?