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Orgo-Life the new way to the future Advertising by AdpathwayShort answer: Every moving light in the original video is a satellite. The bright lights that rise from the ridge and then fade are Starlink satellites in a "horizon flare". They fade when they go into the Earth's shadow.
The video
- "UFO OG.mov": 2 min 53 s, 3840×2160, 23.976 fps. It is a DaVinci Resolve export, so it has no camera time stamp.
- The sky is very dark and the ridge is just below the frame. The lights come in at the bottom edge.
Step 1: The stars give the camera direction
I stacked all the frames, keeping the brightest value of each pixel. This shows each moving light as a trail (image below).
The bright "stationary" light at the top left is the star Izar (ε Boötis). Its wiggly trail shows camera shake. It also shows that the camera settled for the first ~22 seconds, then was bumped and zoomed in (1.36×) at about 88 seconds.
I aligned every frame on Izar and stacked them again. This showed three fainter stars: HIP 71995 (mag 4.8, just below and to the left of Izar), σ Boötis and HIP 71094. These four stars give the camera direction:
- Azimuth 300.5° (WNW), elevation 3.9°
- Field of view 5.9° × 3.3° (about 350 mm full-frame equivalent), then 2.4° high after the zoom
- The bottom of the frame is about 2.2° above the horizon
Step 2: The satellites give the time
I measured each moving light frame by frame and changed its pixel positions into sky positions with the star solution. Then I compared each track with every object in the Space-Track orbit data for 29–30 September (16,837 objects in low orbit).
Eight lights matched eight satellites, all with the same start time. The first frame of the video is at 21:56:34 PDT (04:56:34 UTC, 30 September), to about half a second. The match errors are 0.01° to 0.1°, which is 8 to 60 pixels in the 4K frame.
| 0–12 s | STARLINK-32710 | 0.03° | 12.0 s | 13.1 s |
| 22–47 s (brightest) | STARLINK-32361 | 0.017° | 47.2 s | 46.3 s |
| 48–58 s | STARLINK-35648 | 0.024° | 57.6 s | 54.1 s |
| 54–78 s (bright) | STARLINK-30439 | 0.015° | 77.6 s | 75.7 s |
| 115–118 s | STARLINK-35833 | 0.012° | short flare | later |
| 143–156 s (bright) | STARLINK-30127 | 0.095° | 155.7 s | 156.2 s |
| 6–32 s (moves up and left) | KUIPER-00128 | 0.095° | leaves the frame | – |
| 140–159 s (fast, crosses) | KUIPER-00012 | 0.014° | leaves the frame | – |
Why they look strange
- They rise from the ridge. The Starlinks are about 2,200 km away and only 2° to 4° above the horizon. They come up from behind the ridge as they move toward us.
- They are very bright. The Sun was 40° below the horizon, in nearly the same direction as the camera (azimuth about 302°). Satellites low in that direction are still in sunlight. The flat underside of each Starlink reflects the sunlight to us like a mirror, within 2° of a perfect reflection. This is a Starlink "horizon flare".
- They all disappear in the same place. Each one fades within 1 to 2 seconds of going into the Earth's shadow. The edge of the shadow is a fixed line in the sky, so they all fade at about the same height. The light keeps going, but we can no longer see it.
- Some lights look stationary. The "stationary" lights at the top left are the stars Izar and HIP 71995.
- The two Amazon Kuiper satellites are higher (623 km) and are not flaring, so they are fainter and do not fade in the same way.
Satellites in that part of the sky were flaring for most of that hour, which explains the similar lights before you started filming. In the image, each trail has its satellite name and its time in the video.
















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