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ISS watching.

rb22

By rb22
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rb22

rb22

Posted
Posted (edited)

To find out when the space station is passing over you, go to http://www.heavens-above.com/ and put in your location.

It has a sweet feature (click on the dates) which shows the track! (19:07 tonight, UK)

sorry if this has been posted before, I couldn't find anything..

Edited by rb22
i put 'times' instead of 'dates' d'oh!
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mustwinfull

mustwinfull

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Cool website! Unfortunately thanks to light pollution I am unable to observe the ISS, a single star or sometimes even the Moon from where I live :(

My city isn't too bad but there's a cloud cover currently and I don't think it will disappear in the next two hours.

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thorfinn

thorfinn

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I saw two passes this summer while in the country. Very closely spaced, actually, just two days apart... that's why I looked for that site, after the second, I was surprised to see it come around so quickly. I think I understood that places at midway latitudes will see a bunch of passes in a couple of weeks (it must fly over in that kinda 1-hour window after sunset) and then nothing for some months.

On the other hand, it's been years since I saw an Iridium flare... the first time was quite startling: "I didn't think that spy satellites used the flash" has become a family joke since that night :D

Edited by thorfinn
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maltesh

maltesh

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I saw two passes this summer while in the country. Very closely spaced, actually, just two days apart... that's why I looked for that site, after the second, I was surprised to see it come around so quickly. I think I understood that places at midway latitudes will see a bunch of passes in a couple of weeks (it must fly over in that kinda 1-hour window after sunset) and then nothing for some months.

On the other hand, it's been years since I saw an Iridium flare... the first time was quite startling: "I didn't think that spy satellites used the flash" has become a family joke since that night :D

I'd say the opposite is true for the mid-latitudes. I'm at ~41 degrees North latitude. Been running various programs to scrape Heavens Above and put ISS passes (And Iridium Flares, and Tiangong-1 passes) in my Google Calendar on and off for the past three years. Days on which the ISS is visible (either before sunrise or after sunset. ) are the norm. interspersed among that are scattered days when it isn't visible. Every few months you get a week or two where it isn't visible. Even more rarely, you sometimes get a day or two where it's visible both in the morning and in the evening.

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thorfinn

thorfinn

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Are you counting early mornings too, not just evenings?

I didn't do such a thorough check, so I believe you are right and i had just a small sample, unless that detail makes the difference.

(btw, did you write the programs yourself or used some cunning utility?)

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maltesh

maltesh

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Aye, both mornings and evenings.

The program I've been using to scrape Heavens Above has changed quite a bit over the years.

Initially, I'd set up a Google Apps Script to do it and automatically create events in my calendar.

Later, I built a Yahoo Pipe that would accept an address and produce a subscribable calendar. Unfortunately, the fickle rules of Yahoo Pipes broke it often, so I abandoned that path.

Later, I wrote a C# program which, given an address, would fetch the information, create an .ICAL file, and save it to my Dropbox's public folder, and set up a Scheduled Task that would launch it every day at 3AM, and subscribed to the public link in Google Calendar.

Unfortunately, earlier this year, Dropbox started using a robots.txt that disallowed Google Calendar from fetching calendars from Dropbox.

So now I use the File synching utility Syncbak to launch the C# program, which runs. Then Syncbak FTPs the .ical file to my website, and Google Calendar pulls the .ical file from there. So far, so good.

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rb22

rb22

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it's can be so bright, I saw it last night even through thin cloud!

twitterers can follow @twisst for alerts, tho they've been having some trouble lately as twitter considered their many DMs as spam!

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rb22

rb22

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via ESA

"Very bright ISS pass over most of Western Europe tonight around 20:54 CEST (18:54 UT)"

should be good, mag-3.0, 53° from here! may try for a pic. 19:54 BST

edit: just heard it had a boost so may be a bit late.

Edited by rb22
boost!
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mustwinfull

mustwinfull

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Nice!

If only I had a device that would kill street lamps and remove the heavy cloud coverage. That, or a driver's license :(

I don't like light pollution either but I have got a very large field next to me which is mostly in the dark and that does the trick except for things on the horizon where the night sky actually looks orange. Sadly I cant do anything about cloud cover and I missed today's pass which was a lot brighter than yesterday's one for me.

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