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I was taking photos of the Perseids meteor shower on 13/08/2022 in Peak District in the UK. The camera was fixed stably on a tripod, set on manual mode, taking 8-second exposures continuously.

When I was editing photos, I noticed 31 consecutive images showing light trails in a very small area. These images were taken between 1:52:17 AM and 1:56:03 AM, paused, and then continued from 1:56:48 AM through to 1:57:23 AM. I cut out the trails from the images and merged them in Photoshop. The result is shown below:

enter image description here

Another observation is that each image only shows one trail. This means this could be one object moving very fast back and forth, or a number of objects moving in a formation passing a light source. Could the latter be Starlink satellites?

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    $\begingroup$ Starlink was my first guess, but I'm not sure. $\endgroup$ Commented Aug 14, 2022 at 22:07
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    $\begingroup$ @StuartRobbins heavens-above.com/StarlinkLaunchPasses.aspx Set the location (latitude, longitude, time zone) then use the arrows to go back and forth one day at a time, and the drop-down box to select various recent launches. I took a quick look and found several possible candidates. I'm not sure where "Peak District" is exactly and I didn't take into account the possibility that the UK uses daylight saving time. At circa 7780 m/s a five minute window means they could have spread out over 2000 km so the launch could be as much as several days old already. $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Commented Aug 14, 2022 at 23:58
  • $\begingroup$ @Anthony Beautiful Photo! $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Commented Aug 15, 2022 at 0:03
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    $\begingroup$ @uhoh thanks for your comments. I should have clarified the location and time zone, but here is the link with the correct info: heavens-above.com/… The object(s) should be around altitude 29 azimuth 87. I will go through the list after work. This is getting interesting. $\endgroup$
    – Anthony
    Commented Aug 15, 2022 at 11:17
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    $\begingroup$ @AaronF Yes I think I also saw that as I was messing around with camera settings. I noticed the ground was lightened up and I paused for a second then looked up. I could only see a light trail. I thought that could be a large meteor. $\endgroup$
    – Anthony
    Commented Aug 22, 2022 at 10:32

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