While watching television last night ("Ghost Hunters" rerun) I was summoned outside by Glenn. Apparently, it was an optimum time for us to see the ISS, or International Space Station.
I'm usually pretty hip to stuff like that (interesting occurrences that deal with Space), but that was the first I was hearing of it. He had been alerted to it by some of his Facebook friends. So anyway, I slid my flip-flops on, grabbed a jacket, and joined him in front of the building.
Yep, it was up there. A bright ball of light, bigger than the stars dotting the night. It was moving right along. The space station travels at over 17,000 mph. From our perspective down here it doesn't look like it's moving too terribly fast, but...well...there ya go. I think some of the stuff I've read on it said that the station sees a sunrise around every 90 minutes or so.
It was a cool feeling seeing it up there. We were able to watch it for about 4 minutes, so we actually had a nice space to view it in. I dashed inside and grabbed the binoculars and the camera. Looking at it through the binoculars could have been especially cool as I think I could have definitely made it out better, but it was just too dang bright to get a good look at it. Passed the 'noculars off to Glenn and made an effort to snap a picture of it. I fully realize that any decent photo I could take would be of a big bright dot in the sky, but that would have been fine with me. In retrospect, I should have tried to get the photo first because by the time I flashed a frantic shot it was passing behind the trees. The image I did get is completely black except for a faint grey dot the circumference of a pencil eraser. (I zoomed in thinking that would help...the station wasn't visually that big.)
Looked up the NASA site where they list ISS sightings. There is one more for Savannah:
Saturday, May 01 @ 8:28PM ~ Duration: 2 Min.
Don't know if there will be any more added to the list for this year. I joined the RSS Feed, so I'm sure I'll be alerted if there are. If you want to check it out for possible times to view it where you are, here's the link:
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/cities/skywatch.cgi?country=United+States
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