Spaced out: The International Space Station is buzzing over Nacogdoches this week
Trent Jacobs - Daily Sentinel - July 6, 2009
Did anyone happen to look up to the heavens on the 4th of July and see a bright object streaking across the sky and disappear into the horizon as quickly as it appeared?
It wasn't fireworks, and it moved too slowly to be a shooting star.
It wasn't a close encounter of the third kind or one of those pesky North Korean rockets. And, no, it was not Superman.
If you wondered if it was an old Russian spy satellite keeping tabs on Charlie Wilson's whereabouts in Lufkin, you'd be close, but still wrong.
The object flying across the night sky was in fact the International Space Station, and it is making a few more passes this week a mere 220 miles above East Texan's backyards.
If by chance the cloudy skies that are predicted to blanket the area clear up this week, the space station will be so bright that a telescope won't even be needed to see it. In fact, the space station moves so fast — 17,227 miles an hour on average to be exact — that most traditional telescopes can't keep up with the station as it moves on its orbit. So a good pair of binoculars or the naked eye will work best.
If a telescope was able to track the space station, the observer shouldn't expect to see a little astronaut waving back to them through the window. It's still too far away and moving way too fast for that, says the director of the SFA observatory Dr. Norman L. Markworth.
For nearly 200,000 years, the brightest object in the sky, other than the moon, has been Venus. But now that the space station is equipped with its massive solar arrays, it can reflect enough sun to cause flares 25 times brighter than our celestial neighbor, and can, at times, even be seen during broad daylight passing over a clear blue sky as a tiny white spec.
"The space station right now has gotten really big, so it's reflecting a lot of sunlight," Markworth said. "Being in Earth's orbit and also reflecting sunlight, it's bright for a while, then it passes into the Earth's shadow and completely disappears. It comes and goes."
He also noted that you don't have to necessarily leave town, as most astronomers do to escape the light pollution of cities, to see the space station. But being on time is key, as the space station is here and gone in just seconds.
"Don't listen to the DJ on the radio or go by the bank clock," Markworth advised. "Have an accurate clock nearby, and of course you want to be looking in the right direction. If it doesn't come within in about a minute of the predicted time, there are either clouds in the sky that they're not seeing, or they're not looking in the right direction."
Markworth advises that starry-eyed observers seek out flat areas like parking lots or ball fields to keep the tree line from interrupting their view, as the exact angle of the space station's flight path changes drastically from night to night. The reason for the nightly shift in direction is because while the space station is rotating around us, we here on Earth are also rotating underneath it, albeit at a much slower speed.
NASA only posts available sightings about two weeks in advance. But expert and amateur astronomers alike will get an added bonus if the space shuttle Endeavour launches on time on July 11 and later docks with the space station on its mission to deliver a Japanese experiment lab to the orbiting research facility.
Markworth said that, generally, the space station's visibility cycle repeats itself every few days, so there may be a chance both the space shuttle and the space station will be visible in tandem.
As the shuttle approaches and disengages, there will be not one but two bright and objects streaking through the heavens just a couple of degrees apart.
The next possible sighting of the space station with the space shuttle close by will also be a poignant and visible reminder to the whole world of how far human spaceflight has come 40 years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldren on July 20, 1969, became the first men to walk on the surface of the moon.
About a year from now, the final space shuttle missions will take place marking, the end to the 11-year cosmic construction project of the space station that now represents mankind's sole beachhead into the final frontier. The Constellation Program will takeover for the shuttle program by developing new spacecraft and booster vehicles that will send astronauts back to the moon and possibly to our nearest neighbor in the solar system, Mars.
Interestingly, had the space shuttle Colombia not disintegrated over Nacogdoches six years ago on February 1, 2003, taking the lives of its seven crew members, its next mission would have been to visit the International Space Station later in that year to deliver an air lock. The Colombia was the only shuttle that existed during the Russian Mir space station and the International Space Station eras to never have docked with either.
The following ISS sightings are possible from Tuesday, July 7, to Friday, July 10, over Nacogdoches County. Zero degrees is horizon level while 90 degrees would be straight overhead.
Date/Time Duration Max.Elevation Approach Direction Departure Direction
Tue Jul 07/05:40 AM 5 minutes 67 degrees 11 degrees above NW 11 degrees above SE
Tue Jul 07/10:04 PM 5 minutes 26 degrees 11 degrees above W 10 degrees above NNE
Wed Jul 08/04:31 AM 4 minutes 18 degrees 10 degrees above N 10 degrees above E
Wed Jul 08/08:53 PM 5 minutes 69 degrees 11 degrees above SW 11 degrees above N
Thu Jul 09/04:55 AM 5 minutes 72 degrees 11 degrees above NW 11 degrees above SE
Thu Jul 09/09:18 PM 5 minutes 25 degrees 11 degrees above W 10 degrees above NNE
Fri Jul 10/05:21 AM 3 minutes 21 degrees 19 degrees above WSW 11 degrees above S
Link to regularly update sighting schedule for Nacogdoches
International Space Station live tracking