Moving objects in the sky seen over Windsor-Essex. Here’s what they could be

A string of moving bright lights in the sky was seen over Windsor-Essex Sunday evening by several CTV News viewers.

The sight came shortly after U.S. military fighter jets shot down an octagonal object over Lake Huron, the latest incident since a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon put North American security forces on high alert.

Several people sent images and video to CTV News Windsor, showing a moving chain of lights in the sky. Some are wondering what the Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) could be.  Moving object in the sky by Cottam, Ont. (Submitted to CTV Windsor)

Several media reports indicate the train of lights were part of Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starlink Satellites which are used to provide internet to remote locations.

According to the official SpaceX Starlink Satellites website, they could be seen at 7:37 p.m. Sunday, and will return with good visibility at 6:42 p.m. on Wednesday Feb. 15, 2023 and again on Thursday Feb. 16 at 6:45 p.m.

“There's a lot going on, especially with the increased space activity, satellite launches, said Denis Vida, meteor physics postdoctoral researcher at Western University.

“It was a recent batch of Starlink satellites that was launched a couple of days ago, and they're still climbing in their orbit,” Vida explained. “They're quite bright before they reach their full configuration.”

Vida worries the bright satellites are interfering with the images and data that telescopes typically discover. 

“The problem with Starlink and these bright satellites is that they leave trails on the image and they can ruin either the aesthetic or the scientific quality of the data set,” Vida said. “So they're actually working on trying to mitigate the kind of satellite influence on their imagery and try to remove them but that's really hard because there are just a lot of them.”

Vida joins other astronomers who believe people are still getting used to seeing the string of lights traveling the sky, even though a multitude of SpaceX satellites have been spotted over the last couple of years. 

“It's more of a recent phenomenon in the last few years since Elon Musk's company has started launching this grid of thousands of small micro satellites into orbit,” said University of Windsor astronomer Steve Pellarin.

“As more and more of these things get launched into space, people are going to be seeing a lot more of these kinds of patterns of strange lights moving through the sky.” 

Pellarin continued, “and the first couple of times you see it, it looks very strange. You're kind of wondering, you know, ‘this is not normal. What is this?’ It’s very unlikely that they're little green men out there flying around watching us.”

Pellarin told CTV News, “There are apps that you can get for your phone that actually identify satellites and other objects that are flying directly over your location. You can punch in either your latitude and longitude or you can use the GPS features on your phone to geo locate where you are and then the software actually can figure out based on archives of data that they have on the number of the different satellites that are put in the archive, they can figure out when they're going to be overhead.”