A reddit user (name omitted because it apparently triggered Reddit’s filters the first time i attempted to post this 😄) recently made a post entitled ” Triangle of Orbs filmed by Chris Bledsoe on Easter Sunday : r/UFOs (reddit.com) “. This video shows in all likelihood a trio of Chinese spy satellites.
The video shows a trio of starlike points moving linearly against a stellar background. I could not identify the stars, so I used astrometry.net to identify the field. I performed a screen capture of a segment of the video, then ‘erased’ the moving objects and uploaded the star field image to the astrometry website, which quickly identified the field.
At about 0:08 of the video the 3 moving objects surround a star – this is Phi Ursae Majoris. Alpha Ursae Majoris and Beta Ursae Majoris – the two brightest and westernmost stars of the “bowl” of the Big Dipper – are the two stars at lower-left. Here’s the field labelled; all stars are in Ursa Major except for 46 Leonis Minoris:
yaogan — Postimages (postimg.cc)
Satellites triplets are a familiar sight to some amateur astronomers, particularly visual satellite observers, and I had immediately suspected that this was what Bledsoe’s video shows. So then it became a matter of seeing if one of the triplets passed over Bledsoe’s area on the indicated date.
I do not know Bledsoe’s precise location, but as I recall it is somewhere near the Cape Fear River in southern North Carolina, and so I selected Elizabethtown, about midway between Wilmington and Cape Fear, as a location. This location was entered at Heavens-above.com.
The United States used to have several orbiting satellite triplets which were known as “NOSS triplets”. I think these are either no longer in operation, or at least no longer exist as trios of satellites. To the best of my knowledge the only existing satellite triplets are several launched more recently by China; these satellites are named Yaogan (though not all the Yaogan satellites are components of satellite trios).
Heavens-above has a searchable satellite database. I selected “Yaogan*” to search through the database, then identified the trios, and checked to see which has passes observable from Elizabethtown on March 31, 2024.
Eventually I found that one trio, that composed of Yaogan 31-G, Yaogan 31-H, and Yaogan 31-J, would have had an observable pass centered at 9:11 pm on that date. Here I have overlaid the path of each onto a single map:
yaogan2 — Postimages (postimg.cc)
Note that one of the satellites follows a path so similar to another that they appear as a single line on the map. I have placed a red dot on the position of each satellite at 9:12:00 local time – note that the three formed a triangle moving northeastward through Ursa Major, just about to pass near Phi Ursae Majoris. In agreement with the video the two more westerly satellites passed west of Phi Ursae Majoris, one following the other, while the easterly one nearly occulted that star (Bledsoe’s actual position must be slightly further east than Elizabethtown, lol).
Since a satellite trio was visible from Bledsoe’s location on the indicated date following very closely the path shown by the moving objects in the video, I conclude that the video very likely shows the satellite trio Yaogan 31-G, Yaogan 31-H, and Yaogan 31-J.
submitted by /u/Allison1228
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