Sighting in Moye, February 28, 2022

While sorting photographs taken over four days, an amateur astronomer and astrophotographer noticed a bright white, star-like point in deep sky on just one image out of a batch of 170. The witness had seen nothing with the naked eye: the point showed up only in the photo, taken with an astronomical refractor fitted with a dedicated camera. They worked out the celestial coordinates of the point and the time of the shot precisely, then searched several technical databases and star catalogues and contacted several specialist groups, without getting a satisfactory answer.

GEIPAN agreed to investigate, even though it normally handles only direct naked-eye sightings, because the data were very precise and the phenomenon resembled a classic case of sunlight reflecting off a satellite. The timing remained imprecise, however: the exposure lasted 5 minutes and the flash occurred at an unknown moment within it. Two possibilities were considered at first, a satellite flash or a gamma-ray burst. The second was quickly dropped because the event was too brief, and GEIPAN's astronomy expert found no astronomical phenomenon on record in that direction at that time. The image also showed a faint trail that seemed to coincide with the point.

Searches in GEIPAN's database turned up nothing, so the CNES space surveillance service (Centre d'Orbitographie Opérationnelle) was asked to help. A first Starlink satellite, poorly referenced, was ruled out after analysis of its real trajectory. Another satellite lay in Earth's shadow, so it was unlit and could not have been seen from the observation site. Searching at a much higher altitude, investigators concluded that the image very probably showed sunlight reflecting off the second stage of a DELTA rocket, which was at 6,780 km altitude at 20:22:10 UTC, 0.5° from the estimated direction of observation. The trajectory reconstructed from the trail confirmed this. The case was classified A: a satellite flash, a reflection of the sun on part of a DELTA rocket. The study also revealed an update problem in consumer apps, between the predicted and actual orbits of newly launched satellites.