Did anyone else manage to get this on camera, or was it just me fumbling with my phone like an absolute plonker while three lights held perfect formation for a good four minutes?
I caught maybe 90 seconds of shaky footage on my Samsung S23 before the battery died - classic - but even in the mess you can clearly make out the equilateral spacing between the three points. No variation in distance, no drift, dead still relative to each other whilst the whole formation was slowly rotating clockwise.
Few things I'm genuinely curious about:
Altitude estimate - anyone with proper kit get a fix on this? My Bresser scope was inside and I wasn't fast enough to set it up in time, Duration - I had it from roughly 22:40 to 22:44 GMT before it just winked out, all three simultaneously. Did it go on longer for anyone else?, Sound - absolute silence from what I could tell, though I'm in Dorset so I was watching a livestream rather than there in person
That last point is the one that really nags at me. Conventional aircraft in formation always produce some kind of acoustic signature at low altitude. Silent, rigid triangular formation with simultaneous disappearance doesn't tick any of the usual boxes - weather balloons, military exercise, drones - at least not comfortably.
Has anyone cross-referenced this against the ADS-B Exchange data for that window? That's usually my first port of call for ruling out the mundane, and if nothing's showing up in that timeframe over Phoenix, that's when things get genuinely interesting.