Last week i saw the shuttle and the ISS streak accross the sky for the first time. A colleague of mine (thanks Kurt !) gave me a link to a nice little iphone App called "SightSpaceStation" and although the name is a little weird, it turned out to be a great app that overlays the ISS's orbit over the iphone camera's image.
So when the shuttle undocked from the ISS last week i took my wife and kids outside at 19:15, held up the app and we first saw the shuttle appear and then following right after, the ISS appeared.
WOW and HOLY CRAP !
You really could only see two little specks up in the sky but my heart started to race anyway. I imagined the astronauts sitting at the controls of the shuttle getting ready for re-entry. My son was quite disappointed though - "Dad - i can just see two little dots - you said we'd see a spaceship and a space station !" - i guess he was waiting for a star destroyer or a cool looking space station.
The next night when i put my daughter to bed she wanted to look out the window so that she could "see the robots again" : ) I thought that was pretty funny. I hope that when they get older that they'll remember that night standing at the window in their jammies watching two dots up in the sky that had their dad all excited.
I think that maybe with this iphone app i could point my telescope at a specific spot and then maybe i'll get lucky and might get a shot of the ISS next time it swings by - which does not seem to happen alot when you live in Switzerland.
Have any of you successfully taken a picture of the ISS ? I wish i was able to just fly to Florida to see the last Space Shuttle take off in April.....
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When I was about 14 I told my parents and four brothers that I was going outside at 8pm to watch the Space Shuttle pass overhead. They laughed at me. "You can't see the Space Shuttle from the yard. It's up in space!"
ReplyDeleteSo I told them with complete confidence--which was unusual for me--"Of course you can! Come out at 8pm and see for yourself."
8pm everyone goes outside, ready to tease me, when they all see a small light passing slowly across the sky.
"Oh my god, that's it! I can really see it!" my brother said. And I said, "That's just a satellite. The Space Shuttle will be much brighter." He nearly wet his pants.
Then this bright, definitely not an airplane, light passes overhead and the whole family is absolutely dumbstruck, partly because they always thought I wasn't very smart as that was the running theory of my school.
Years later, now 43, I am a Harvard graduate who works for IBM, and I just bought my very first telescope--a Celestron 6 SE.
Suck it pundits.
In the site http://www.heavens-above.com/ you can set your location and it will tell you exactly when and where will the iss (or another satellite) appear
ReplyDeleteIf you check out the satellitetracker group in Yahoo there is free software available for download that i use myself and works well with my nexstar 6se for tracking satellites as they travel across the sky. It also works well with the ISS. If you join the same group and check out the folders section you will find lots of photos that people have taken off the ISS from their back gardens with telescopes. The software is a bit fiddly the first few times you use it but it soon becomes a simple 5 minute setup with a bit of practice.
ReplyDeletePaddy
ACK! W-, w-, what happened to the blog?! :(
ReplyDeleteHi John - honestly, I guess I just ended up doing other things and my good old telescope has been sitting in the basement for years now.
ReplyDeleteI just went through all my blog posts and feel a little sad : (
But who knows - i might pick the hobby up again in the future. The scope is probably still working just fine....
You really should, there's plenty of people who have SEs and would love to hear more from you. Especially any good or bad photos you take.
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