ALLERLEI

So last night, in the middle of May, we lounged in our hot tub in the backyard, contemplating the night sky. It wasn’t a super-clear, starry night, but the seven stars of the Big Dipper — Ursa Major — were clearly visible, and some other stars as well. Our home, being located not too far from McGee-Tyson, the regional Knoxville airport in East Tennessee, we see lots of airplanes, still high up in the sky, flashing their lights, trailed by their sound. 

Occasionally, we see satellites slowly wandering across the sky. They don’t blink and we simply see their reflection from the sun. They’re much higher up than airplanes and thus appear to cross the sky slower.

Around 9:45pm or so we did see a satellite, roughly the brightness of the Big Dipper stars or a bit brighter. It clearly wasn’t an airplane — no blinking and no sound. Satellite sightings are relatively rare from our location, but this time we spotted two going in the same direction, roughly west to east. 

And then another and another. For about ten minutes we saw lights crossing the sky, sometimes in pairs, sometimes one by one, sometimes several. Initially they all went in roughly the same direction, at roughly the same speed, though some went a bit faster or slower. They were nothing like shooting stars. They just purposefully moved across the dark sky. 

We had never seen anything like it. More and more kept coming, almost 40 in all, and while they initially all went the same direction, later ones were at slightly different angles, and some went in a completely different direction. They did not fly in formation, though, and they also weren’t regularly spaced. 

We got our image-stabilized binoculars to get a better view, but even those just showed white dots. We texted a friend who works at the airport. Was there something going in? This felt spooky. Was the United States under attack? Was it UFOs? That all seemed unlikely. But then what were we seeing, what had we seen?

The answer soon came. Probably StarLink satellites. Once in orbit, they move around the world in just 90 minutes. They generally go west to east, or at least observers perceive them of doing that. There are about 7,000 up there, at an altitude of about 350 miles. They are released from their Falcon 9 carrier rocket, between 20 and 30 at a time, at about 200 miles and then use their own engines to get up to their operational altitude within a few days. 

Searching the web, there are numerous images of Starlink sightings, almost always as a string of equally spaced lights. Whereas we saw them flying across the sky irregularly spaced and not always at the same speed. We saw all this Saturday night, May 17, 2025. And, sure enough, Tthe most recent Starlink launch had occurred on May 16, 2025, when SpaceX launched 26 Starlink satellites, each weighing 1,600 pounds, from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. So that must have been it. Though we had counted more, over 50.

That higher number was soon explained. The findstarlink.com website showed two viewings over Knoxville on May 17, the first (G6-91, launched May 9 from Cape Canaveral) at 9:47pm for about five minutes, and the second (G6-83, launched May 13 from Kennedy) at 9:55pm also for about five minutes, both going Northwest to East. So we didn’t actually see the most recent launch from May 16, but the two launches prior to that. It was interesting that we should see them together and also that they looked equal in brightness, which wouldn’t be the case if one or both were still rising to their final orbit.

Live and learn. Seeing them in the sky had been a remarkable experience for sure.