Sunday, April 15, 2007

International Space Station


The ISS in a planetarium near you.......

Because of the lovely weather recently sitting in the back 'gard' has been order of the day and with the clear skies it has been good 'hardware' gazing conditions.

Iridium flares are getting a bit old hat now so I turned to the ISS, which as it orbits the earth every hour and a half can be nice to watch. 6 people are currently on board the station; Fyodor Yurchikhin, Oleg Kotov, Sunita Williams, Charles Simonyi, Michael Lopez-Alegria and Mikhail Tyurin. The last three are only on-board for 5 more days when they will leave for Earth.

The ISS is particularly bright at the moment with a magnitude of '-1.0' which is almost the brightest star in the sky so it is very easy to spot. All you need is a time to look.
ISS Passes

Useless Trivia:
Flight Engineer Suni Williams plans to run the Boston Marathon on a station treadmill on Monday, April 16, at 10 a.m. EDT. As an official entrant in the race, she will circle Earth at least twice in the process, running as fast as eight mph but flying more than five miles each second. (I shit you not!)

1 comment:

Glynn said...

You know loads about space, you.