Space Gazing

On Thanksgiving evening, our son D noticed a little blurb on a Yahoo page that told that the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station were going to pass over later. From there he was directed to a page that told the time and directional path of the two, based on specific zip codes.

This night was quite clear. While we have lots of stars visible from our yard there are also trees that block the path described.  So we bundled up the folks and ourselves and headed out into the chilly dark.

We only needed to go a couple of miles out to the church lot on the highway that is beside a large open pasture. From there we had a great view of the two “ships” in orbit. D set up his camera on a tri-pod and this is what he got:

The streaks show the movement over minutes. The little, almost vertical streak near the center was a plane. The diagonal ones that are so close they appear as one, are the Shuttle and Space Station. Of course to our eyes, they were just bright dots moving rapidly across the sky.

One was brighter, though they were both bright. We think that the Space Station was ahead of the Space Shuttle.

It was the first time any of us had seen either of these in orbit. It was really quite a thrill and made for yet another special memory for this Thanksgiving. Even my mother who has macular degeneration was able to see this. Pretty cool.