See the “Aliens”… Uh… Satellites Again Tonight in Warrensburg

According to the Warrensburg Police Department's Facebook page "a lot of you were posting about aliens last night." Heck, I don't think it's just people in Warrensburg either. My buddy Brian back in Illinois had posted something about a line of lights in the sky that were something he had never seen before. Relax, don't worry, it's just Elon Musk's SpaceX Starlink Satellites.

And you can see them again at the following times over the course of the next week. The times are the same for Warrensburg and Sedalia:

Tuesday April 28  9:18 PM CDT for four minutes. Look West to South.

Thursday April 30  5:47 AM CDT for six minutes. Look Northwest to Southeast.

Friday May 1 9:20 PM CDT for five minutes. Look South to Southeast.

Dev@cmdr2.org set up a website called the SpaceX Starlink Satellites Tracker at findstarlink.com  that tells you all the good times you can see the Starlink Satellites across the world. For our area of West Central Missouri there isn't a need to plug in specific coordinates, using the Kansas City times works just fine. It's definitely a handy site if you want to make this a family tradition during the era of self quarantining and social distancing. (A hat tip to whomever is running the Warrensburg P.D. Facebook page for including the link in their post.)

According to their website Starlink hopes to bring high speed internet to the world "with performance that far surpasses that of traditional satellite internet, and a global network unbounded by ground infrastructure limitations, Starlink will deliver high speed broadband internet to locations where access has been unreliable, expensive, or completely unavailable."

The amount of Starlink Satellites that it will take to do this is concerning, my first thought was space junk, but it turns out there's another concern. How all these Starlink Satellites will eventually change the study of looking at the sky. What's up there now is just the beginning. You can learn more about the concerns astronomers have with Musk's Starlink Satellite program here if you're so inclined.

For now, the Satellites are nice diversion to have while we're staying home and social distancing. I'll be looking up tonight at 9:18, I hope you will be too.