We saw the light show as we crossed England this early morning. About 5 lights, swirling around each other, due east.
About 5 degrees above the horizon.
this was our position:
N5120.0 W00300.0
At 0325Z.
klm714

FlightRadar24 has you on a heading of 072 degrees and at N5120.0 W00300.0 at 0318Z at this time, so heading roughly ENE.
In-the-sky.org shows that there were a bunch of Starlink satellites just above the horizon at ENE, and directly above the sun which was about 42 degrees below the horizon. These are the same conditions for which the Starlink Flares have been confirmed in the past.

https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....a97b8f90b0.jpg

Hello all, I'm an air traffic controller operating airspace in the eastern chunk of the North Atlantic. There have been a big increase of these sorts of reports from aircraft recently. We often get asked "is there any military activity?", but nothing displayed on radar.
Occam's razor to me just says satellites flaring, as often the reports are similiar to the comments above, where the sightings are higher and far away, brightly lit before suddenly dimming, which is consistent with solar flaring. If you sit outside and watch for a while you will see the ISS flaring and dimming as it passes overhead. I know you are all well aware of that, and what satellites look like though. You're the ones up there seeing them every night of your working lives.

However yes the swirling/ziz-zagging effect that flight crews are seeing is perplexing and hard to explain. Perhaps what we are seeing is just multiple satellites/starlinks suddenly flaring/dimming quickly, and giving the effect of individual movement, when in reality it is a group transiting in and out of view, displaying an illusion of rapid direction/velocity change etc. Just a hypothisis. It is a strange one though. Maybe we are actually being infested with other flying objects and our commercial airspace isn't as pristine as we like to think it is.

We did have an interesing report from a crew at FL410 very recently saying they saw a group of bright lights "below and dogfighting" at 0500utc, we attirubuted that to some training sortie getting airbourne off a aircraft carrier without telling anyone, or maybe what looked below was just far away and actually well above.

Who knows. It's always curious to get reports though, makes night duties a bit more interesting.

Reports always seem to increase from November onwards every year though, which makes me think it's related to a lower winter sun relative to the viewing position causing increased visual flaring events.
Kudos to Flarkey above for their efforts and for applying science and reason.

A very thorough and erstwhile investigation done there. Well done to all concerned.

Thanks Flarkey for that info.

what we saw overhead England this morning lasted for about 15 minutes. There were 5-7 lights moving around a central point. They were brightening and dimming, with such a bright-dim cycle taking about 45 seconds to complete. All light points did this, not at the same time but as a result sometimes 2 would be at their brightest and the others were at least faintly visible.
All lights were continuously observable.
Especially the concentric pattern was something I have never seen before. This swirling motion was both clockwise and counter-clockwise.

jokes about “CIA satellites above Ukraine” and the like is the best that we could think of.

They were absolutely not moving in a straight line at any time, from our vantage point.

Very interesting. Could you possibly draw a diagram that represents how they moved - particularly the "concentric pattern" and the "swirling motion". Maybe add a Moon for angular scale.

Someone posted the raw video of one of these sightings;
reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/z982oi/user_uploaded_video_deleted_earlier_today_airline/
Was this one of your guys? Or were you in the air when this sighting went down?

I’ve recently seen a video taken from a passenger window, showing what appear to be similar swirling lights to those described on this thread. However, the lights were below the aircraft, rather than ahead/above in the distance.

Due to a lovely bout of Covid I’ve not been at work since I started this thread. Skimming the thread it seems that it’s likely to be starlink (am I correct that that’s the consensus?). Just to put that to bed, has anyone seen it going west?

It has been seen going west across continental USA. Here's one Reddit post...
https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/commen...bs_over_co_us/

Here's the investigation we did... (turned out to be starlink again)..
Another Pilot Sees Orbs Circling Over the USA ( MUFON Case 125796) | Metabunk

Similar occurence yesterday evening 2045-2115Z north of Scotland and was seen by multiple aircraft on frequency (Scottish) and 121,5.

Sighting was in NW direction and seemed fairly low for such a bright satellite (as if it was FL350-FL450). We thought maybe some military A/C doing refueling or dogfighting with their lights on as it seemed some kind of racetrack pattern were being followed. Moved right to left at high speed, almost to fast for regular aircraft so it fit’s the description of the Starlink Flares as being mentioned.

Only thing weird to me is that it was extremely bright and low on horizon without any distortion of the atmosphere. I’ve seen passes of ISS which were less brighter than yesterday’s sighting. Somehow amazed that such a small Starlink would generate such a strong reflection at such a low angle towards the N’Pole.

What an interesting thread
 

Sometimes size doesn't matter :bored: , what's doing the reflecting does.....

As an example Iridium "glints" or "flares" that were produced by the early generation Iridium satellites were as bright as magnitude minus 8 or so, brighter than ISS...and those were produced by sunlight reflected off a six foot by three foot'ish metal panel (an antenna).


Iridium Flares

Star link satellites, like all others, travel in straight lines.

Reports concerning these lights state that they change direction and “swirl” around each other. How can that be attributed to star link satellites?

I was going to ask precisely the same...!??

Because many Starlink satellites flaring one after another in the same part of the sky can look like one object with lights continually swirling around.

I've seen these lights myself and they do look like circling planes. But when viewed through binoculars you can see that they are indeed multiple satellites.

But the OP, (Back to Boeing), specifically said he thought they were not.

Let me write some notes on this.

Starlink's satellites do have a very distinct shape, largely one big and flat solar panel, mounted perpendicular on the further rather planar satellite body itself. And a who line of these satellites do line-up in the same orientation with their solar panel (of course slightly deviating according to their earth orbit). Be in the right spot, and you can see the sunlight mirroring in the solar panel, though not for all satellites at the same time.

When the whole (including the viewer) moves, the satellites giving the perfect line-up and providing the sunlight mirroring will "jump" among the line of satellites.

Another item relevant is the light polarization. Given the high-tech solar panel materials, the sunlight mirroring will depend on the polarization, or better, the opposite, where the mirroring will only let through specific polarization directions (which in turn also varies with the viewer position).

Compare this with the good old Polaroid sunglasses, taking away the sunlight reflection from the water surface in swimming pools. Polaroid sunglasses take away the horizontal polarized reflection glare according to the vertical polarization direction of the sunglasses. Turn your head 90 degrees flat, and you have the sunlight reflections in the water back.

Because the satellites as well as the viewer are moving in 3D, the light polarization at the viewer end is probably going to change, because the satellite mirroring surface is not a "mirror" though more a refraction pattern, with the effect that the mirroring is depending on the detailed surface structure of the solar panels as well the incident angles (more than one mirror angle) (so, it's not a bathroom mirror type of reflection).

Another aspect what may cause the perception of "dancing" satellites is, the anisotropic refraction characteristics of glass (cockpit windows). The result is that the same light source will start to end up as 2 or 3 points after it passes the glass. This even happens when the light goes perpendicular through the glass. This is a very strange aspect, not many people know about.

When, may moons ago, in university, my daily driver was a good old and rusty 1976 Austin Mini-van, where the rear door windows "doubled" the headlights of cars behind me. An offset of roughly 2–3 times the diameter of the headlight of the car behind me. The displacement angle was around 30 degrees with the vertical. When taught in physics college about the anisotropic refraction, it became clear to me, this was the reason of the double headlights visible in my car. In those days, there were no fancy led-lights, just ordinary filament bulbs, with no polarization, or whatever.

When such an anisotropic refraction happens, with light, where the polarization does change, the light source will seem to "move" between the 2 anisotropic refraction locations. I think, this is something happening with the described "light-show", where satellites seem to move around each-other (on top of the "next satellite mirroring). Looks very strange, until you understand what is happening with the polarization and the anisotropic refraction.

For those interested in this anisotropic refraction aspect, look-up the wiki articles around this subject.

Flying from Canada to Europe on 28th, at 0530 UTC for about an hour, some strange lights were visible. They moved relative to each other, sometimes quite fast, and occasionally became really bright, almost as if they were aircraft within 5nm with LED landing lights. Perhaps brighter. Our heading was 094, alt F320, between 40w and 30w. They didn't seem to move any higher above the horizon than when we first saw them. I'll post some sequential photos, you'll have to view them in the dark but they're quite clear. The brightest (reddish) light on the right is another aircraft ahead of us. Area of interest is mid lower beneath the arc of stars, a group of 3 lights which form a changing shape triangle. In one photo you can also see how one of the lights seems to zoom up almost vertically whilst the other stars remain static. Photos taken about 7 seconds apart.

https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....90b14f57dc.jpg
https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....cc053fe8eb.jpg
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