Satellite train mimics UFO over Estes Park skies by Kim Branum

There is no question that I am a bit of an astronomy nerd….I LOVE looking at the stars. One of our favorite things to do in Estes Park is to stargaze from the driveway. I thought I was loosing my marbles when we saw this crawl across the sky!

Have you ever seen an object in the Estes night sky, so different from the typical billions of other sparkles and stars and wondered, “Did I really just see that?” On the evening of April 21, my husband and I had that experience, but somehow, were both able to capture the unique object in motion with our phones. Every time we questioned actually seeing what looked like a lit-up version of Santa’s sleigh, we could watch the encounter to remind ourselves that yes, what we witnessed really did happen.

Around 9:20 p.m., we were laying in my mother-in-law’s driveway, gazing away at the magical Estes sky.  Stephen and I live in Charlotte, NC much of the year, but are in Estes several months out of the year. The Charlotte skies feel much further away from the stars than they do here, so Colorado stargazing is one of our favorite past times.

We witnessed several shooting stars and a few individual satellites…..then all of the sudden, I sat up and rubbed my eyes, not believing what I was seeing. It was a line of over a dozen lit-up, connected squares, moving slowly across the night sky, and eventually vanishing into the darkness, as if it had entered a black hole.

Fortunately, I am a lover of research, and figured out that what we thought was a UFO was actually a train of 53 satellites that had been launched from Cape Canaveral Space Station in Florida just 14 hours before our sighting. The satellites were launched on the Falcon 9 rocket and belong to the internet company Starlink.  They eventually will spread out over time into their proper orbital pattern.

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