Lights in the Sky - Have You Noticed Them?

[MineralMan]

I sure have. See, I'm a smoker, I'm sorry to say. Many years ago, I stopped smoking indoors. Smokers' houses stink. These days, I have a second floor balcony deck, about 16' by 20', and that's where I go to smoke.

I live in a western suburb of the Twin Cities in Minnesota. Off about 10-12 miles to my east is MSP International airport. There are also three smaller airports nearby. My house is underneath both a departure and approach path for one of MSP airport's runways. So, when I'm out at night, I get to see lots of lights in the sky. Sometimes, there's noise, too, when airliners are departing or approaching MSP to and from western destinations.

Small private planes fly around here, too, along with the occasional helicopter and even some Air Force cargo planes from the National Guard base. Even at night, it's pretty busy up there. I like it. It's entertaining. We also have a lot of high-altitude air traffic, passing over the Twin Cities from other places.

At night, all of those things have lights on them. All of them. There are different lighting configurations, depending on the aircraft and what that aircraft is doing. I see landing lights, too, on airliners approaching MSP and sometimes on airliners leaving MSP. Often they come on or turn off near where I am. Red lights. Green lights, white lights. Blinking lights. All sorts of patterns.

Altitude matters. It's really difficult to guess what the altitude is of lights in the sky, frankly. High altitude planes with lights look like they're small and moving slowly, because they're like 5 or 6 miles above me. Are they planes or drones? Well, I don't always know what they are. They're far enough away that I can't always see the configuration of the lights. Just a blurry set of lights. They look slow, but they're going 500 mph.

Then there are satellites. They're out in orbit, going thousands of miles per hour, but seem slow-moving. I've even seen long strings of small communications satellites go by. In California, once, I saw the International Space Station fly over when I was out smoking on my parents' balcony.

My point? There are lots of lights in the sky in many places. If you're not out there often, you might not have seen them. It's surprising. There's always stuff flying around. I've learned to identify many of those lights. Sometimes, I use a pair of binoculars to get a closer look. Those are right at hand where I usually stand on the balcony.

What are people seeing? I have no freaking idea. I've seen some cell phone videos, but they're not much help. People can't hold their phones steady, so the lights they're following jump around. However, I've seen airliners, high-flying planes, helicopters and other flying things in those videos. Mostly out of focus and fuzzy. I recognize some of them, but most are unrecognizable.

Is it something to worry about? I don't think so. Come stand on my balcony in the evening a few times. You'll see them, too. I can tell you what most of them are. The one thing I don't see is drones. Those, I've only seen in the daytime, when some realtor or whatever is flying one around to take some video. At night, it's all commercial traffic in the sky, and there's lots of it.