Spot the station!

[kinnison]

as an amateur astronomer, and armchair astrophysicist I love being able to see the ISS in orbit. The relatively BLAZING magnitude of the station as it makes a flyby is rather fascinating to me. many a night i have spent in my backyard in the suburbs of LaCrosse wi. on a clear night i use the ISS detector app (android) to find it, pr anything is visible while enjoying a nice fire in my fire pit

as i often say to my wife on those nights. it is going to appear "there" and you will know it when you see it. Sure enough a bright dot appears in the sky and travels across the sky. and silly me tracks it until i lose sight of it. making that magical connection in my mind between me and the astronauts and the thousands of support personal that make it possible. wishing with all of my heart that someday I might travel beyond the atmosphere and with the stars

Anyone do the same? or at least spend nights looking up the the sky to find bits of the evidence of civilization in the heavens as satellites fly by?

[astropapi1]

There's nothing better than hearing someone shout "look, a shooting star!" and having the pleasure of telling them that it's not a piece of rock, it's actually a 450 ton spaceship built out of pure badass material and international cooperation, crewed permanently for more than a decade.

"Oh, come on... you're just making up..."

No, I'm not. There's actually six people right now, riding that star across the horizon right now. We did it, we put our own star in the night sky.

Edited October 24, 2014 by astropapi1

[KerikBalm]

Some people can't tell a shooting star from an orbiting object?

What I like to do is try to figure out what sort of orbit the sat is in.... its fun spotting ones in more or less polar orbits.

My dad, who did classified satellite related stuff in the 70's used to tell me that the ones going north-south were probably military, and the ones going west-East were probably civilian communication sats.

Although I think that has changed now, as there are quite a few civilian sats giving us images used for things like google earth.

[xrayfishx]

Unfortunately, where I live, the ISS isn't visible. I don't understand why, though. It's at an inclination of 56 degrees. If I've learned anything from RSS it's that this means it reaches the latitude of 56 degrees. I live at a latitude of 59 degrees. That's 3 degrees difference, which is about 330km. The ISS is always around 420k. That means it should be visible at over 45 degrees from the horizon occasionally. Why is life so unfair to me, why do I never get to see it?

[Kryten]

My dad, who did classified satellite related stuff in the 70's used to tell me that the ones going north-south were probably military, and the ones going west-East were probably civilian communication sats.

Although I think that has changed now, as there are quite a few civilian sats giving us images used for things like google earth.

Quite a few weather sats are in polar orbits as well, although most of those are technically military.

[cantab]

Unfortunately, where I live, the ISS isn't visible. I don't understand why, though. It's at an inclination of 56 degrees. If I've learned anything from RSS it's that this means it reaches the latitude of 56 degrees. I live at a latitude of 59 degrees. That's 3 degrees difference, which is about 330km. The ISS is always around 420k. That means it should be visible at over 45 degrees from the horizon occasionally. Why is life so unfair to me, why do I never get to see it?

The ISS has an inclination of 51.6 degrees.

That said you should still get passes. Heavens Above gives passes for Helsinki, which is even further north, and it gets to about 20 degrees altitude at best.

[GregA]

Those of us down south don't get to see the northern lights, and everything in our telescope is a mushy blur because of the warmer wetter air.

[xrayfishx]

Those of us down south don't get to see the northern lights, and everything in our telescope is a mushy blur because of the warmer wetter air.

Well, I've never seen northern lights either. Though that's mostly bad luck, not that there never was any.

The ISS has an inclination of 51.6 degrees.

That said you should still get passes. Heavens Above gives passes for Helsinki, which is even further north, and it gets to about 20 degrees altitude at best.

I don't know which is worse - that I didn't remember ISS's inclination correctly and will now have to send several missions to my station to fix it or that Heavens Above didn't give me any passes before. Well, now it did, but all of those are in daylight, except for one which will be in the distant future of... 2.5 hours ago.

[cantab]

When I was checking Helsinki I noticed there were weeks with loads of passes and weeks with none, so maybe it's the same for you. Also I have had "daylight" passes that were plainly visible in the evening sky, so don't discount them.