Wednesday, February 10, 2021

Satellites

Did some satellite watching tonight, saw eight in forty minutes, an average of one every five minutes, the first four or five clustered in the first 10 - 15 minutes. I checked some of their appearance times and trajectories against the 'Heavens Above' app and identified at least four: Sitch 1, Cosmos 1461, ERBS and a Starlink one, all agreeing with the app for appearance and trajectory. The others didn’t fail to accord with it, I just didn’t check the app for them so they may or may not have. I will conduct futher, more stringent tests, and possibly ask others I know in differnt parts of the world to make similar observations so we can compare our results.

If there is one every five minutes on average that gives 72 possible sightings per night if we allow three hours after sunset and three hours before dawn, when they are visible. In 1956 the first satellites, the Sputniks, were tracked by citizens. That means we have gone from two per night to 72 per night in 65 years.

Among those who claim space travel is impossible I have heard three explanations for these objects: Airships – Way too fast for airships I would say. And where are they going when they leave our sky? They can’t land until they have covered the whole sky that is dark for the tracking app but then they would enter a zone in the day and be visible, but we never hear of those sightings. Lasers – What then is the laser light shining on? NEOs – Why the sudden appearance in the last 65 years, increasing every year, and why were no NEOs orbiting the Earth recorded by astronomers before 1965?

These fast-moving lights now occupy the night sky when they didn’t historically, beginning with the era of space travel. Their movement across the sky describes an orbit around a globe earth as indicated by the app ‘Heavens Above.’ What are they, and how are they getting up there, if they are not man-made objects launched into space by rockets? It still seems to me to be the most likely explanation.

World map of satellites above Earth