Trailing bright lights streak across Sonoma County skies, puzzling those below

Some who stared into the heavens Friday night across Sonoma County weren’t sure what they were seeing.

Streaks of fast-moving bright light were visible starting shortly after 9 p.m. from across Northern California, including in the mostly clear skies above Santa Rosa and Petaluma. It was enough to send the popular neighborhood social media network Nextdoor into a tizzy as people questioned what they had witnessed.

“Any one see that weird trail of flying lights in the sky, flying southward. It didn’t look like planes, maybe drones?” Deanna Alberigi commented from west Santa Rosa.

“They had tails and fire,” said Mary Johansen of Rincon Valley.

Several people wondered if the glowing orbs were that of Starlink, a satellite internet constellation operated by billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX. When visible, the company’s satellites look like evenly spaced white dots in the dark sky.

“I’ve seen the Starlink, this was nothing like those,” Johansen said.

Bob O’Brien was at home in Oakmont when he caught a glimpse of the starry sight.

“What ever these are they were traveling at a high rate of speed on fire across the sky,” he told The Press Democrat late Friday.

He didn’t figure them to be meteors because they burned too long. And he, too, didn’t suspect Starlink.

“To me it looks like space debris re-entering the atmosphere,” he said.

Some hurriedly tried to capture photos and video of the mysterious atmospheric spectacle, but it only lasted a few moments.

Though exciting for those on the ground to see, Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said it was most likely space junk returning to Earth.

“The ICS-F was cataloged as object 45265, 1998-067RJ. It orbited the Earth as space junk for 3 years, and reentered at 0430 UTC (9.30 pm PDT) over California, widely observed from the Sacramento area,” he said in a series of tweets late Friday.

He corrected in a subsequent post that it was actually ICS-EF, which stands for Inter-orbit Communications System-Exposed Facility. It was used for sending communications between a Japanese International Space Station module and Mission Control in Tsukuba, Japan. It was launched in 2009 and had a mass of 683 pounds, McDowell said.

“It probably almost completely burnt up during reentry, but any small surviving debris may have, at a guess, reached the Yosemite area,” he said via Twitter.

While there were initially more questions than answers Friday night, many turned to the National Weather Service for some guidance — but they offered a simple message.

“We appreciate all the attention, we do, but we're not THOSE kind of meteorologists,” a post on the weather service’s Bay Area Twitter page read.