…in the words of Mr William Bragg.
We were walking home tonight and saw an amazingly bright satellite tracking across the sky, far brighter than any I’ve seen before. And I’ve seen a few – I love watching bits of space hardware scooting silently across the night sky.
Back home I found a neat web site – http://www.heavens-above.com/ – that allows you to enter your location and get predictions for the brightest satellites, including star and ground maps of their trajectory.
The really bright one we saw turns out to have been the International Space Station, which is pretty cool. The kids were impressed, for a minute or two…
I’ve just done some more reading and noticed two things:
- According to their daily schedules, the astronauts spend an awful lot of time ‘formatting PCMCIA cards’ – maybe it’s code for having a dump.
- The ISS is currently docked with the Space Shuttle Atlantis, so maybe that’s why it was so incredibly bright tonight
Hi Giles – you inspired be to get my camera out.
That animation is a bit swish! I like it.
thank you – plan to improve it a bit… more images, bit smaller and will try to line the moon up a bit better between frames. Making animated GIFs ironically is so much easier in Photoshop Elements than in the Photoshop CS…