Space Station

[TC Chris]

My dinner stove timer rang just as it was time for the Space Station to pass over. I love to step out and observe it overhead. NASA has an email notice, Spot the Station, that will tell you the time and location when it can be observed. It makes an orbit of the earth every 90-some minutes, but you can only see it when it's dark AND at the right angle for the sun to reflect off it, making it visible.

Perhaps you also read about the asteroid sample that just came back to earth, something like 3 years after encountering the object. The sample landed just where it was supposed to. The space program is human competence at its best. We've got the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, both devices of extraordinary complexity, helping us understand the universe. As well as I can recall, it is within my lifetime that we figured out there are other galaxies out there. We sent the Voyager device out, now in interstellar space, carrying its "Golden Record" of human sounds (including Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode") and a Pickering cartridge to play it with.

So whenever time and weather allow, I take a few minutes to go out and scan the night sky for the Space Station passing over.

Chris Campbell

[hermitcrab]

I'm waiting on Betelgeuse to go super nova as the astronomers all claim seems to be starting ... but if it is light years away we will be long gone before it happens ... if at all...