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."

Comments

Know where satellites are at all times

[ghamerly]

Heavens Above 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.

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 =)