I'm guessing there is a local effect of the Bortle scale because when the skies were clear we clearly saw about 30 Starlink sattelites and according to https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/ we live in an area with Bortle class 8-9, the algorithm for calculating the Bortle class seems to be a bit work intensive. https://www.handprint.com/ASTRO/bortle.html