It looks like a UFO, but the one spotted in the sky of Lecco is the Starlink satellite constellation of multibillionaire Elon Musk, launched to bring Internet connection everywhere.
Mount San Martino, near Lecco, has never been so bright as in recent days. Despite the wave of bad weather that has crossed northern Italy, between the famous lake and the picturesque Lombard capital has been spotted a fascinating trail of bright dots in the sky, very similar to a UFO.
It is not, however, any alien pinched to monitor our planet. On the contrary, the singular "train" of lights has entirely human origins, and is the child of scientific progress. The one observed by amateur photographer Matteo Ratti, who has captured the beauty in a shot, is in fact the passage of the constellation of satellites Starlink, launched into orbit by the private aerospace company SpaceX entrepreneur Elon Musk.
If the nature of the phenomenon is therefore entirely scientific, it is however impossible not to fantasize in front of the photograph of Ratti, first impressed by the spectacle offered by the satellites that have crossed for more than one night the horizon on the Lecco branch of Lake Como. And that, in spite of the initial - and understandable - fear, he didn't think twice before grasping his faithful camera and "capturing" forever a living proof of the human progress, giving it also to those who didn't have the privilege to observe it personally.
After the disturbing melody arrived from Venus and the possible proofs of the existence of life on Mars, now it's just the sky of Lecco to "speak" and to light up. Thanks to what, on a technical level, is in fact a constellation composed of several small broadband satellites weighing about 220 kilograms each, and which are used to bring the Internet connection in areas of the world where there is currently no access to the network. The photographer from Lecco renamed them on Facebook - where he posted his picture, taken on Friday, May 7 at 23:00, on the group Sei di Lecco se - "the evening trains", but a simple search on the web was enough to understand where they came from. The image has inevitably triggered the curiosity of many users: there are those who joked about extraterrestrials and those who preferred to share the links to the sites findstarlink.com and satellitemap.space, where fans can follow the trajectories of the satellite constellation and find out immediately when and where to sight it.
Currently there are 1433 satellites of the Starlink constellation in orbit, but Musk s plan is to increase the number of satellites in orbit to a total of 1500 by the end of the year.
Andrea Guerriero