2012-07-20 - Long Beach, CA - Light

2 white star-like objects moving in tandem, synchronized turn, no plane lights

Once in a while I like to sit in the back yard and gaze at the stars. Tonight was one such night. To the south I saw what I thought might be the Pleiades, but after my son and I examined it through binoculars, we could see that it was a single star.

Remembering that the Pleiades was higher in the sky, we walked around to the front of the house where we had a wider view of the sky, and as soon as I started searching for the star cluster, a bright white light suddenly appeared high in the southern sky. My son saw it, too. It lasted for about a second or two, and got about as bright as Venus gets when it’s at its brightest before it faded.

I quickly grabbed my binoculars which were hanging from my neck and focused on the area where we saw the bright light. My son was also searching the area. Then both of us noticed that there were two star-like objects moving vertically in tandem, pretty much due north, about two thumb widths apart, arms fully extended (my son later told me). They maintained precisely the same distance apart. As I was tracking them with my binoculars, I was explaining to my son that they were probably satellites because the lights weren’t blinking and they were moving about the right speed for satellites, although I was thinking that they were moving a tad too fast to be satellites. But that seemed like the most logical explanation.

Then he asked me why there would be two satellites, and while I was thinking of an explanation, the two objects suddenly banked about ten degrees to the east, still moving north. They started the turn at precisely the same moment. It wasn’t a sharp-cornered turn, but the radius was fairly tight. What amazed me was how precisely they maintained their distance apart. Then we both lost them around the constellation Cygnus. My son later told me that the trailing object was the one that got bright.

One explanation is that they were military jets, and the bright light was one of the jets reflecting the sun which had set three hours earlier. And I suppose that the pilots could have been able to maintain a precise distance apart. What didn’t seem right, though, is that they didn’t have any blinking or colored lights. They were single white lights, like medium-faint stars.

I’m 55, amateur astronomer, been sky-gazing since I was a kid, and besides one strange object I witnessed from a plane a few years ago, which I reported here (it’s possible it may have been a Mylar balloon), I’ve always been able to explain everything I’ve seen. Although the best explanation might be that they were military jets, the absence of blinking or colored lights or contrails (we couldn’t hear any engines, either, but they seemed to be way up there and we wouldn’t necessarily have heard them) seems to place that theory in question. And I don’t have any other explanation.