No, it wasn't aliens — Here's what those bright lights spotted across the Sacramento area sky were
SACRAMENTO — A lot of you called our newsroom last night to report bright lights in the sky. Some even got some great video of the mysterious lights. So what were they?
If you looked up in the sky Sunday night and wondered, "What the heck is that," you weren't alone.
"I'm not in the least bit surprised you guys got a lot of calls about this event in the sky," said Kyle Watters, the director of the Sacramento State Planetarium.
He says what people saw was the most recent batch of Starlink satellites — 56 of them that were blasted into space from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
"They eventually will end up in an orbit high enough where they're basically invisible to the naked eye, but shortly after they're launched, they're kind of making their way up into higher and higher orbit," Watters said. "And so they're much lower down than they'll eventually be, which means they're close to us on the surface, which means they're brighter."
SpaceX has had dozens of Starlink launches and is just one part of what is a growing space industry. The Starlink project aims to provide high-speed internet services from space to remote areas on Earth.
"The industry is definitely booming," Watters said. "The advent of, and I'm going to use finger quotes, "affordable space launches," I mean, we're still talking millions of dollars, but it's better than tens of millions or hundreds of millions. There's a lot going on."
And a lot in the news — SpaceX, Blue Origin, NASA — and it's sparking an interest in space, especially images from the recently launched James Webb telescope.
"The imagery we get is really what kind of grips people and younger people, especially," Watters said.
So the next time you see these lights, don't freak out. Just take it in.
"It's very much our technology, not anyone else coming to give us a visit," Watters said.
Watters said the best time to see Starlink satellites is shortly after sunset, or shortly after sunrise.
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