Trying to ID strange lights in the sky in NSW Australia

We’ve just seen some very odd lights in the sky and I’d love to hear theories on what they might be including any boring explanations.

We’re in Northern NSW Australia on the coast just below the Qld border. At about 10.50pm (Feb 23rd, 2024) I was outside and saw the lights on the horizon in a south westerly direction. It’s hard to tell how far away they were but maybe about 10-15km away.

I saw them first and then got my partner out of bed and she witnessed them too. I tried filming but they were too distant to show up in my phone recording.

They looked like bright stars taking turns to glide casually through the sky before disappearing. Most times there would simultaneously be one rising slowly up vertically from behind the mountain, while another would sort of appear off to the north and then they’d slowly move at right angles towards each other to sort of meet and then gently disappear. One would be moving up from the horizon while the other was moving parallel to the horizon.

All up I think I saw about 10 of them.

It wasn’t starlink, I know what that looks like. It wasn’t fireworks – they had a consistent slow-medium speed with no visible arc of momentum.

If they were projectiles of some kind they weren’t coming from the same starting point. I guess drones are a vague possibility but they would have to be extremely large and bright, and launched from different points many kilometres away from each other over mostly sparsely populated farmland to meet in the sky in a weird way before fading away. It would need a high degree of co-ordination for a very small audience and for what purpose?

It definitely didn’t look like planes or helicopters. There were no blinking signal lights and they looked to be so close to each other at times that regular aircraft would have been at risk of collision. And they just disappeared one after another.

I’ve never seen fireworks or any other projectile so slow and casual, but definitely moving steadily through the night sky. They also sort of wobbled slightly and didn’t go in a perfectly straight line.

They were not very high up. Hard to tell how high from this distance, but very easy to see and maybe the altitude of a light aircraft.

Happy to have someone tell me a boring explanation, but I personally can’t think of anything that makes sense.