Beep! NASA here, a 400 tonne spacecraft is about to buzz your house US space agency NASA, to mark twelve years' continuous occupation of the International Space Station, has set up a service which will alert users round the world when good chances to see the station pass over are about to occur. Under favourable conditions the ISS is the third brightest object in the sky, outshone only by the …
This is an excellent web site, and it gives predictions for lots of other satellites and assorted space junk too. I've been using it for many years.
The great thing about the ISS is that its orbit is at just the right inclination to the Earth's equator so that it occasionally passes directly overhead if you're anywhere south of Birmingham.
NASA aren't behind.
I've been using http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/index.html for a couple of years IIRC.
Yes, you have to proactuively visit it to get info, but last week I had half my local pub visitors out in the beer garden to watch the last ISS Transit.
Thanks for yours & other posts with most stuff to spot & way to spot it.
Also the SatTrack app from Android that takes the Heavens Above feed and adds a few rather useful extra functions to it.
Also it's not much, but a half-decent reflector telescope and some luck gave me this blurry picture.
Hopefully will get a better one some time with the 100x eyepiece, if I can keep the damn thing steady enough. Try locking onto that thing with a scope and you can tell it's doing every one of those 17,000 miles per hour.
I have nothing against exploring Mars but this "Man on Mars" is absolutely senseless. What could those guys do on Mars better than robots and satellites. And what about the cost, cheaper of course if they are left there but then again they would not be able to appear in commercials in old age. What did the guys on the moon achieve that robots could not have achieved, absolutely nothing. A completely political decision, and OK, but do we need that again.
Only when we have the means to build a colony on Mars would I understand it, and then again what the hell would that colony on Mars do.
>What could those guys do on Mars better than robots and satellites
I agree short term from a science prospective but getting off the planet long term should be a major goal for some of humanity for a variety of reasons and this is the next step.
>Only when we have the means to build a colony on Mars
Have to figure out how to go there first before building a colony.
>what the hell would that colony on Mars do.
Make humanity a lot less likely to be wiped out by a single doomsday event (which we are about due for).
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