Here’s a quick guide to tell meteors from machines in your wide-field images of the night sky. Can you find the real meteor? It's the colorful streak in the center ending in a terminal burst. The rest are flaring Starlink satellites clustered low in the eastern sky a couple hours before dawn. During the time exposure, the two brightest gradually flared to around magnitude –1.5 and then faded. Others were caught brightening up (upper left) or fading (lower left). Bob King As ever more night-sky images pop up on social media, I see more and more artificial satellites misidentified as meteors. So many satellites crisscross my own pictures — especially when photographing meteor showers — I sometimes scratch my head trying to tell one from the other. Whether we like it or not, the proliferation of Earth-orbiting satellites in recent years has compelled us all to contend with the increasing mechanization of the night sky. To that end, here are several ways to distinguish meteors from their machine imitators.…