Scratches on the Sky

Are there UFOs in the skies over the Apostle Islands? Actually, what is up there may be even much more dangerous to the beauty of our dark skies.

The man on the beach at Little Sand Bay was saying that he was from upstate New York. Saying he was just camping here for the night but what he really wanted to say, was in his eyes and he blurted it out just as soon as there was an opening in the small talk: “I think I just saw a UFO.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him, it was actually something much more dangerous.

It was Wednesday night last week. Predictions for possible northern lights were high but then so were the winds meaning that it would be dangerous to venture out in the dark, alone, on the blue-black back of Lake Superior in the Little Dipper. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you may remember a late night excursion earlier this summer where I did indeed see the northern lights from the Little Dipper but paid a high price for it for in mechanic charges after I hit an unlit gill net buoy.

Still, I wanted to see the northern lights if they made an appearance so this time I opted for a safer venue. I’d stay on the shore, walk the beach at one of the mainland units of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore: Little Sand Bay.

During the peak of summer, the campground at Little Sand Bay is packed, the sky dimmed with campfires, and flashlights. Motorhomes glimmer with UFO-like landing lights. But on this night, there were few campers, one car in the parking lot, and just one other person on the beach. I had the sky virtually to myself and it was clear, more stars than wave-washed pebbles on the shore. It is said that the unaided human eye can see as many as 4,500 stars in a dark night sky. I walked along the old floating boardwalk over the dunes, counting.

Almost as soon as I left the board walk and set my feet back into the sand at the edge of the lagoon, there came a faint glowing arc across the northern sky over the lake, a smudge of green, barely visible to the naked eye, but there.

People often ask when they see photographs of the northern lights, “did it look like that to the naked eye?” The truth is no, but there is a reason. The human eye processes light at about 1/60th of a second and does not store that light. A shot of a dim aurora might be taken with a 30 second exposure. That means your camera is collecting 1800 times more light than your eye sees and storing that light. So, while my eyes were only picking up a faint fuzzy green, my camera was seeing this:

As beautiful as it was, I knew that this was the tail end of a solar event that had sparked the skies the night before. I knew it wouldn’t last. I set to work. When I shoot northern lights, it is a guessing game in the dark. I work fast, moving my tripod to various spots, raising and lowering the angles, juggling the manual settings — ISO, aperture, and shutter speed — to fit the strength of the light, the clarity of the reflection, the brightness of the night. It is a “flow” moment, where I am completely absorbed in the task, falling into the motions I have practiced a thousand times and following my instincts to choose composition, settings, working fast in the dark.

And when I’ve worked all the angles, sometimes I put the camera aside and just sit. It is such a gift to lie in the sand looking straight up at the beaded black quilt of a dark night sky, to feel the galaxy whirling around you, watching light that has traveled sometimes centuries over millions of miles just to glimmer in your eyes. Some look up and feel small, as if measured against the universe. I look up and feel bigger somehow, filled with wonder and awe simply to be alive among the stars.

The aurora was fading, as if just one last whisper before going dark, and I was growing chilled and stiff on the ground. I stood up, set up my camera, and took one last photograph.

That is when I saw it.

“It was a UFO,” the man from New York was saying, the only other person who had been on the beach as I neared my car. “Did you see it?” He didn’t pause to let me answer. “It was a string of lights, right close together, too high to be a tower. It wasn’t a tower, was it? Are you from around here? Do you know what it was? I’ve never seen anything like it.”

I stepped back a bit. He was buzzing with energy, and I thought maybe he would give off a glow of his own from all that excitement. It was best to just let him talk. I didn’t have the heart to tell him, at least not right away.

According to data kept by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, there were 11,330 individual satellites orbiting the earth at the end of June 2023 and that number is growing, rapidly. One reason for that growth is the Starlink project.

Begun by eccentric billionaire Elon Musk’s aerospace company SpaceX, Starlink is an ambitious and technologically-audacious plan to create the next giant leap in global communications. SpaceX launched the first 60 satellites of the project in May 2019 and since then have launched thousands more. A kind of man-made constellation, Starlink today consists of over 5,000 small satellites in low Earth orbit that circle the globe once every 95 minutes bringing coverage to more than 60 countries. Plans are to deploy 12,000 total satellites in the project’s first phase at a cost of some $10 billion and as many as 42,000 in all, bringing coverage to virtually everywhere on the planet.

In the night sky Starlink looks like a flying zipper, a dot-dot-dash alignment, a kind of celestial train zipping through the stars. There are websites where you can enter your longitude and latitude to find times when it will be passing overhead if you care to see it.

Not everyone cares to see it. Astronomers, night sky photographers, amateur star gazers, have all registered their complaints with Musk’s company. Yes, it will provide vital communications to millions who might otherwise not have coverage. Yes, it is a technological marvel. But, for some, lying on your back in the sand, staring straight up into the heavens, is a ticket to a world beyond the man-made, a chance to ponder things beyond the reach of technology and mundane earthbound reality of internet connections. Seeing the fake stars of Starlink shining back down at you with their unnatural straight line symmetry is, to some, a scratch upon the night sky, a crack in the lens of the universe.

SpaceX, Musk’s company, has not been unsympathetic to the aesthetic intrusion argument. Newer satellites (called Darksats) more recently launched have been dimmed using surfaces that reduce their reflective properties. Some (known as Visorsats) have even been armed with a deployable visor that shades the antenna from the glimmer of sunlight but is transparent to radio frequencies. All meant to make them less intrusive in the night sky.

(An artist’s rendition of a Visorsat - SpaceX)

That is what my new friend from New York had seen out over the Apostle Islands, the passage of Starlink and not a UFO. He seemed so disappointed as I explained it to him that I added, “Well, it was ‘unidentified’ to you and it was a flying object.” He smiled. “And,” I continued, “just because what you saw this time was Starlink, doesn’t mean that there aren’t UFOs in the Apostle Islands.” His smile broadened, visible even in the dark, a silent acknowledgement that there is still a place in the night sky, and in the human mind, for mystery.

For all the technological wonder of Starlink, I for one still prefer my night skies without the electronic fireflies of endless satellites, filled only with wonders beyond the comprehension of humans. Given a choice, I will take the stars.

Walking back to the car in the dark, I smiled at the unbridled the excitement of the man from New York when he had thought he’d seen a UFO. There should be that kind of excitement in simply seeing the night sky, unfettered with space junk. But a recent study predicted that if satellite deployments continue at current levels, satellites could outnumber visible stars by 30:1 by 2030. Will there be room in such a night sky for wonder?

“Thank God men cannot fly,” Henry David Thoreau wrote long before Starlink, satellites, or even airplanes, “and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.”

— Jeff Rennicke

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