iss-flyover.jpgA couple of nights ago, the family dog came over to me and ‘asked’ to go out. Dutifully, I got my butt out of the chair and walked her out to the back yard so she could do her business.

I usually look up after dark to see the stars, what few of them we can see from this badly light-polluted location. To my surprise, a couple of the stars up there were moving southeastward. I immediately knew it had to be Space Shuttle Atlantis and the International Space Station.

The dog’s new name ought to be ‘Ephemeris.’

I called in the back door to the Better Half and when she came out we could see a slightly dimmer Atlantis leading the race across the sky. Both spacecraft were very bright, about magnitude -2.5 or so. Just before they got straight overhead, they passed behind Earth’s shadow and winked out.

Out of curiosity, I went to one of the favorite websites and looked at the page where you can type in your zip code to see the satellite pass predictions for your area; the pass I just witnessed was on the list, along with a prediction that there would be another pass which I witnessed tonight. I went to the back yard at the predicted time and, sure enough, there was the ISS (Atlantis landed in Florida this morning). I did not have the camera with me on Wednesday, but I brought it out tonight to see if I could image the little point of light sweeping across the sky.

The (clickable) image is the only one that came out. The arrow is pointing at the ISS pinpoint almost straight up as seen through my ham radio 6-meter Yagi antenna. The pass remained visible well beyond the zenith when it finally flickered out in the east. The magnitude was -4 or so. I could see it even when it was behind some thin cirriform clouds in the area.