ISS Flashing Earth

lurgyman writes "For all you morning people out there, NASA (bless their soon-to-be-slashdotted souls) has an article on how the International Space Station will flash brightly in the (very) early morning sky this week over much of the United States."

NASA survives

[karrde]

NASA seems to have survived the /.ing, but poor Heaven's Above seems to be dieng.

I saw it and HEARD it!

[selectspec]

I could hear the $ka..ching $kaa..ching $ka..ching sound as the orbiting vegitable garden flickered across the sky.

Re:I saw it and HEARD it!

[NaveWeiss]

What's funny in that? Explain. (I didn't find any space garden in the ISS when I did a quick google search.. but it'd be cool if they have one).

And also.. is it possible to create pseudo-gravity inside a circular object by spinning it? I mean.. if you jump from it, you might get cut off from the "local gravity" and just stay above while everything continues turning above you.

Know where satellites are at all times

[ghamerly]

Heavens Above [heavens-above.com] is a great site if you want to keep up with the ISS and many other satellites orbiting Earth. It explains when and where you can see them in the night sky, and their brightness. It is all based on your location. I have used it to see several satellites, including a very spectacular showing of the ISS last year.

I think I'm in love...

[Conare]

Now if we could just get Peggy Whitson [nasa.gov]to flash us! Does anyone know whether the U.S. Naval Observatory Telescope [ua.edu] is open on the morning of the 6th?

Flashing Earth :)

[psergiu]

Does the Earth have AMIBIOS of AWARD ?
The Earth's .bin fits on a single floppy ? Where is the Earth's floppy drive ?
What will IIS do if the flashing process fails ? It will be left with an unusable Earth ?
And what this flashing will bring new ? microcode for what new CPUs ? Easier overclocking ? (wow - imagine 2.5 Earth revolutions per day !)

RTFA

[Spy Hunter]

You totally misunderstood what they meant by flashing! Didn't you read the article?

What they REALLY meant was that when the astronauts get dressed in the morning, a thoughtlessly placed window causes them to flash the entire earth.

Yes, no *NSync!

[Raskolnk]

This is just in celebration of the boy band super pop star getting booted from the space program. You know the cosmo/astronauts are relieved.

Of course, now they won't get a chance to silence his oh-so-sweet voice by locking him out in the vacuum.

Been happening for years

[msheppard]

What the article fails to mention is that this has been going on for YEARS (ever since the station launched), and there is nothing special about september really. Actually, it kinda sucks cause you gotta get up early. Wait until late sept or early october and you can see ISS slightly after sunset, which is much more convienent.

"brighter than every other star in the sky..."
Except the sun of course.

Much more interesting, and challenging to find, are the iridum flairs which are sometimes brighter than the moon even. Check out Heavens-Above [slashdot.org], register and enter your town. It is a nice interface showing you sat passes and iridum flair informaiton.

M@

That's not the point.

[n9hmg]

see ISS slightly after sunset, which is much more convienent.
But much less dramatic. Anybody can catch a time to see it, which is no big deal. The big deal is to see it suddenly flash into view, like I did this morning. I'm not optimally placed for it, but I used the data for Phoenix, adjusted by rough guess, and watched the southwest. I'd forgotten to sync my watch to GPS, so I was just giving up, when suddenly, there it was. It would have been cooler to have been directly below it without light pollution, and track it while dim and see the brightening, but it was still dramatic.
Watching it at sunset, you'll only see it dim, instead of brighten, unless they spend a LOT of fuel on delta-vee.

Re:That's not the point.

[msheppard]

You got me thinking, why can't it every come INTO the sunlight during sunset? I'm no rocket scientist, but it seems to me it could orbit the earth in either direction right? Which way we spin realitive to the sun shouldn't matter should it? The earth is a closed system, so if IIS is orbiting the opposite direction the Earth is spinning realitive to the sun, it would orbit INTO a sunrise at night right?

Or does it have something to do with the direction the water spins in the toilet?

M@

Flashing?

[Maxwell'sSilverLART]

Flashing? Quick, cover it up! Won't somebody think of the children?

Pulsing light

[jafuser]

I was at a star party once with a friend, and I happened to catch something that acted like a pulse of light in the sky. It was very odd, and I only saw it once, so I discarded it as a potential glitch in my visual input sensors, and I didn't mention it. I happened to be studying that particular patch of sky for a short while, and then I saw it again. It was a distinct pulse, not a flash. It was as though the brightness level followed a bell curve or parabola. It gradually got brighter, reached a peak, and equally as gradulally darkened back to nothing.

After seeing it for the second time, I assumed it wasn't just my imagination or my eyes acting strangely, so I told a friend who immediately dismissed me as nuts, until shortly thereafter it appeared again.

My friend saw it, and then each time following another person joined the group of those who saw it. After about four or five times I noticed that the pulse was fairly regular, so I timed it. It just so happened to be exactly every two minutes. Very odd.

Some of the astronomers tried to point their telescopes at it, but it's erratic appearance for only 1-2 seconds every two minutes made it too difficult to find. After about 10 or 15 more pulses it started to die down and eventually stopped.

I memorized what stars it was between, and when I got home I looked up anything that was in that spot using a computer simulation. I didn't see anything there until I turned on the ecliptic line.

It lined up perfectly with where the pulse was. It only took me a moment to remember that's where the geostationary satellites are found. So it was just a rotating satellite, and I just happened to be in the exactly right place at the right time to see it reflect sunlight off of one of it's flat panels as it rotated at a perfectly human invented time unit interval =)

I saw it recently using NASA's J-Pass software

[Caractacus Potts]

I saw it two nights in a row a couple weeks ago. If you follow the link below, you will find the NASA J-Pass Java applet. Enter your location and it will display a star chart that shows you precisely where and when to look. Here's a hint, it's only visible right before sunrise or right after sunset. Why? Well, it's orbiting pretty low and quickly passes into the Earth's shadow. It's actually pretty cool to watch it "wink out" after going 2/3 across the sky.

It's so easy to use, my parents were able to figure it out!

J-Pass [nasa.gov]

Blinking lights in the sky

[LaserBeams]

In mid-August, I was outside late at night, trying to catch bits of the perseid shower... Unfortunately, I seem to have missed it at its peak, but I did see a few meteors.

Anyway, while I was outside, I noticed a strange light, moving north, pulsing slowly. It moved much faster than a plane ever would appear to move at a very high altitude, didn't leave a trail, and was apparently very far away, as it was so small and so dim as to be almost invisible.

I'm no astronomer, so I didn't check it out thoroughly, but I'm pretty sure it was a weather satellite on its peculiar pole-to-pole orbit.

It faded out gradually, until I could no longer see it.