What were the bright lights shining above the North East last night?

A straight line of bright lights was spotted ascending into the night sky on Monday night.

The lights were seen all across the North East, from the Northumberland coast, to the suburbs of Newcastle and Gateshead, to rural County Durham. But just what was the unusual phenomenon spotted in the night sky?

Well, it wasn’t natural, and those certainly weren’t stars. Instead, it was a row of satellites launched by Starlink, one of the projects of tech billionaire Elon Musk – and there are more being shot up into the sky in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

Developed and launched by SpaceX, Starlink is a satellite network developed to provide internet to remote and rural locations. As of November 2023, there are more than 5,500 small satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) which communicate with transceivers on the ground.

Dan Pye, director of astronomy and space communication at Kielder Observatory, told ChronicleLive: “You can only see them like this because they’re quite low still, but then when they’re spread out and they get higher, you can’t see them anymore. But if you took a long exposure with a camera you could still see them.”

SpaceX has been launching satellites since 2019, and has been granted permission to fly 12,000 satellites as part of the project, which could eventually be increased to 30,000. Despite providing internet to remote and rural locations, the launch of so many man-made devices into low earth orbit has not been without its controversies, especially due to the effects they could have on an internationally recognised dark sky park such as Northumberland.

Dan continued: “There’s a lot of controversy over putting lots and lots and lots of satellites into space. There is negative impact of that when it comes to stargazing, but Starlink are actually being quite sensitive to that, they’re trying to make them less reflective for when they do eventually achieve their orbit.

“It can impact research astronomy but there are parameters you can put in to mitigate against if if you know where they are and when they’re going to intersect the image. The thing is there’s always this argument between is it good for human endeavour, or is it just polluting [space] and are we being irresponsible?

“There needs to probably be some ruling on how much stuff you can put in Low Earth Orbit, but Starlink has helped people communicate with the rest of the world from Central Africa and Ukraine where usually people wouldn’t have been able to get internet, so there is some good there too.”

A further Starlink launch is set to take place at 11.02pm EST on Tuesday night (4.02am GMT on Wednesday) from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. A live webcast of the mission will begin on SpaceX’s page on X, formerly known as Twitter, five minutes prior to liftoff.