Shuttle/ISS Pass tonight

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For those of you into this kind of thing, the shuttle landing for today has been cancelled due to bad weather at Florida - which means another chance to see it and the ISS together again tonight (hopefully clear skies, I missed it last night).

Should pass SW to SE at around 21.18.

For those interested, go to http://www.heavens-above.com/

and select your town "from database". Then click STS - 128 from the predictions. You can then view a map of where the ISS (with Shuttle Discovery) will pass in relation to you.
 

Soltydog

Legendary Member
Location
near Hornsea
I managed to see them last night :smile:
Just as the Shuttle went out of view in the SE the ISS came into view in the SW. Hopefully another clear night for anyone interested
 
Cheers for the headsup cheadle. I've used that site a lot in the past - it's very useful.

We're off out camping tomorrow night with our kids and brother plus his family: the iridium flare sightings (also shown on that site) are a great way of impressing small children by making lights appear in the sky. B)

Though the elder little-LC now knows what it is and so undermines my magical abilities by telling all her mates ..
 

upsidedown

Waiting for the great leap forward
Location
The middle bit
Lazy-Commuter said:
We're off out camping tomorrow night with our kids and brother plus his family: the iridium flare sightings (also shown on that site) are a great way of impressing small children by making lights appear in the sky. B)
.


LC, those Iridium flare sites look a bit baffling to me, is there an easy-ish way of predicting when and where you can see one ?
 
upsidedown, the "Heavens Above" website is probably one of the best for predicting where flares will be. The trouble is that it does talk about "Alt." and "Azimuth" and all that kind of stuff. I assume that's the confusing bit?

I'll try to do a step-by-step guide - please bear with me and I apologise in advance if this comes across as too basic or teaching granny to suck eggs or whatever.

On the heavens above site, your first job is to set your location. The easiest way to do this is in the "Configuration" bit, using the select from map link. That opens up a page based on Google maps. Just find where you'll be looking from, click on it in the map, give it a name at the bottom and click "submit".

Hopefully, you'll then go back to the "home" page with your location set. (If you register, you can save locations; I didn't bother - I just made the resulting "home" page a favourite / bookmark in my browser).

You can then click on the links to see when the ISS will be visible from that location, or iridium flares or whatever. This is where "Alt" and "Az", or Alititude and Azimuth come into play ..

Altitude is basically how far into the sky in degrees the object will be from the horizon: so 0 is on the horizon and 90 is overhead.

Azimuth is basically where on the horizon you need to be counting the altitude from: North, East, South or West. Or points in between.

So if it gives alt of 53 and Az of SSE, for example, look a little bit east of south (South South East) and then look about halfway between the horizon and immediately above your head.

You need to do this, of course, at the time given on the site. You should see a faint dot moving slowly across the sky, gradually getting brighter and brighter until - after 20 seconds or so - it starts to fade again.

I sometimes find it useful to look at the "whole sky chart" link in the Astronomy section on the home page. That shows you where the constellations / planets / moon are in the sky, which is handy as a guide. Remember that it defaults to "now" at your location, so you'll want to change the date and time on the sky chart page to be when the flare should happen.

The other info on the flare page is the "Intensity (Mag)", which refers to the apparent magnitude of the flare: basically, how bright it is. The lower the number, the brighter it is. And it's a logarithmic scale, so a mag 1 star is roughly 2.5 times brighter than mag 2. I think about Mag 6 is the best the unaided human eye can do from a dark site.

Most flares are between -1 and -9 and so should be easily visible in the night sky, or even daylight for the bright ones. Well, the flares themselves are typically -8 or -9 at the centre of the flare (as shown on the heavens above site) but the nature of an iridium flare means that they dim off quickly from the centre point. For example, my best sighting tomorrow night is mag -8 at the centre, but we're nearly 30 km from the centre so down to mag -1 from where we'll be.

A bit more about magnitudes: the original scale (from a looooooooong time ago) I think went from 1 to 6. But, of course, there's stuff up there that's brighter than magnitude 1, so we have to use 0 and negative numbers. It all gets a bit messy ..
 
You're most welcome, upsidedown. It takes a bit of practice finding your way around but once you do it, you can do what I did the other week: amaze a group of 70 odd adults and kids by your ability to point at a patch of sky and say, "watch up there for the lights to appear". B)

.. and then Little-LC pips up with, "it's an iridium satellite and daddy looks up the times when they go over on the Internet". :sad:
 

fossyant

Ride It Like You Stole It!
Location
South Manchester
Just been out with the kids - think we spotted the Iss shifting over rather quick, low down, but it was a glimpse here and there - daughter not happy - didn't spot it..

Ah well..

I made the mistake of saying that I had seen the shuttle fly over the school (when I was a kid) on the back of a jumbo.....doh............ it flew into Manchester some time between 1982-3......... which it did and those of us who saw it were like "Wooooooooooooooooooooooooo"...modern day answer "WTF"....
 
OP
OP
cheadle hulme
Location
Clywdian Range
Yep, too cloudy here too:sad:. Never mind, I'm sure NASA will de-dock Discovery and do a fly past so we can see it and the ISS in Manc again sometime (not).

Anyway, to make up for it, heres a picture of Atlantis docked to the ISS (you can see the shuttle, its "arse on" to the camera) tiny compared to ISS.

This picture is taken from another forum, but that doesn't make it any less cool.:evil::smile:

atlantisiss_dantowitz.jpg
 
OP
OP
cheadle hulme
Location
Clywdian Range
I wouldn't mind but its been clear all day, clouds only came in as night fell.

And the airport has decided to switch to runway 05, which means screaming airbuses all night GRRR not happy, especially as my car got dinged at B&Q too!
 
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