Station Sighting
Apparently working at NASA turns you into enough of a space geek that seeing the International Space Station from your backyard is really cool. I saw the station for the first time this morning and was (still am) pretty excited!!
There’s been several opportunities to see the station fly over the area where I live but none of them when I was at a place when I could actually go out and look. This morning the station was to fly over at 6:29 a.m. at an almost 90 degree angle from the Earth giving you like 6 minutes to see it. So since I’m already up at that time anyway and went out to the backyard to see if I could find it. I knew it would be moving but wasn’t sure how fast. Six minutes sounded like a long time to cover the entire sky so I expected something kinda slow moving.
With that assumption in mind, I started by looking at stationary “stars” and watching closely to see if they appeared to be moving. I stared at one pretty bright object for like a minute and nothing. So I looked to the right and there was another pretty bright “star,” so I focused on it and after about 30 seconds was like “Yeah, that thing is now higher in the sky than it was when I first looked. So I just stood there and watched it slowly float over my head and then over my house and then out of sight.
When it got almost straight above me it was so bright and twinkly that my jaw dropped just in amazement of what I was seeing. I wasn’t amazed that there is this man-made spacecraft carrying men and women around in space. I was amazed that I could see it. That something that seems so, so far away I could see, and I could see it moving. It was cool, to say the least. Reminded me of the time I saw Saturn through a telescope. With my eyes Saturn looked like a shiny star. Through the telescope I could see its rings! It was amazing.
And, I’m pretty proud of this photo I took. The bright circle on the left is the moon and the small right spot (down and to the right) is the space station. I’m particularly impressed that I took this photo with my iPhone. The iPhone camera is pretty good, but never thought it would take a picture this good of something moving so fast and so far away.
