A mysterious luminous garland could be seen early on Thursday morning in several places in Brabant. Omroep Brabant’s mailbox was full of messages from people who wanted to know what they saw high in the sky.
Traces of a rocket or UFOs? Willem de Nennie from Oisterwijk was the first to think of drones when he was about to go to work. It was a special start to the day for him. “I come outside, I look up and see something very strange. I see a row of lights.”
Willem watched this phenomenon for fifteen minutes. “It was crystal clear, so you could see it clearly. It was a whole row of lights that went very slowly. Then they disappeared from my view.”
A similar story comes from someone from Dommelen. Although he saw the ‘string of lights’ pass by quickly. “That’s a strange sight when you open the curtains at five to six.”
There appeared to be no mention of drones. It was a train of satellites from Starlink, part of Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX. Thousands of floating satellites are intended to provide high-speed internet. And one of those satellite groups flew past Brabant.
Ronald Kaptein of Galaxis, an association for weather and astronomy, explains that rockets are regularly launched with hundreds of these types of small satellites. “If that just happened, you can see a chain of satellites in the sky. Over the days they will slowly spread out,” he explains.
According to him, they are mainly visible shortly before sunrise or shortly after sunset when the sun is already shining on the satellites. “They do not emit light themselves,” said the Galaxis board member. “The satellites that were visible this morning were launched last Tuesday. That train will also be visible in the morning in the coming days.”
Ronald says that there are already more than eight thousand Starlink satellites floating around the earth. A new shipment is launched every few days. “A launch starts like such a train, but it will not always be visible from the Netherlands.”