What they were seeing was Elon Musk's Starlink satellites, lit by a Sun that had already set on Earth. The brightest satellites don't need a telescope to be spotted – on some nights, you can see them with your own eyes.

Without light pollution, the naked eye can make out roughly 4,500 stars, half of the roughly 9,000 in the Bright Star Catalogue.From a suburban street though, that number is significantly reduced. From the middle of a bright city you are down to a few dozen.

And our night sky views are fading: six in ten Europeans could no longer make out the Milky Way in 2016, according to the “world atlas of artificial sky luminance”. The night sky is getting brighter due to ground light pollution, at a rate of almost 10% a year between 2011 and 2022, a 2023 study found. A child who can count 250 stars today will see only 100 by the time they reach adulthood.

This is the sky satellites are currently moving into. More than 18,000 of them are already circling Earth, most of them are part of SpaceX's Starlink.

Companies have already filed to launch more than 1.7 million satellites, according to a July 2026 European Southern Observatory (ESO) study.

The brightest of those would shine about as bright as Venus, a 2026 ESO study found. From a light-polluted city like Munich, the same study found those bright satellites could eventually be the only “stars” left to see, warning of “devastating consequences for astronomy”.

The largest satellite fleet of all is yet to come. SpaceX has asked American regulators for up to a million satellites to power artificial intelligence from orbit. Another company, Reflect Orbital, is looking into mirrors that would bounce sunlight back down to Earth at night, providing sunlight at night.

In reaction to these huge satellite projects, the ESO study recommends keeping a total of under 100,000 satellites in the sky, faint enough to remain invisible to the naked eye, indicating concerns over the sky-brightening effect of too many satellites orbiting Earth.

So how can you tell a star from a satellite ? Wait and watch. A star holds still and twinkles, while a satellite slides steadily across the sky and is gone within minutes. They show up most an hour after sunset and just before dawn, as they reflect sunlight that has already disappeared from where we ourselves are watching.

For thousands of years, people relied on the stars to navigate the world. Whether they remain visible or are replaced by someone's server is being decided by American regulators. So, next time the sky is clear, have a look, while most of the stars are still stars.