2014-09-16 - Escondido, CA - Light

Two distinct lights, similar to satellites, one following other, rotate about axis, change positions and then direction.

I was just outside our house in Escondido at approximately 4:40am on the morning of 9/16/2014. My husband just went back inside for a minute. I was staring up at the sky, stargazing as I very often do. It's a treat when I get to see a meteorite or even a passing satellite. But this time...

There were two very bright, but very high lights passing from East to West. I've seen many satellites passing in my life, and if I had to guess, they were many miles from each other, but within about 5 degrees from each other in my field of view. They looked like most satellites do when passing, a white to red/orange reflective light, but they were slightly brighter than other satellites I had observed. One following the other perfectly.

Then, a few seconds after I saw them, they rotated about an axis and switched positions while still moving West, and continued on in perfectly swapped places. Then the new lead light continued on, while the new trailing light veered off South and disappeared. The leading light soon disappeared (faded) as I would expect of a satellite reentering the earth's shadow.

All of this in the span of 15-20 seconds. My observation covered an arc of about 45 degrees from the time I noticed until the remaining light was not visible.

I have observed many passing satellites, the space station, the old shuttles in my life. I am a smoker who is up late night and early morning and go outside and stare at the sky. I've never seen an event like this, and my main reaction was to repeatedly say out loud, "What is that?"

And this was of course one of the few times I've walked outside without my phone on me, not that I think it would have recorded a viable video even if I had gotten to it in time.