Heads up! Space Station flyby Sunday evening
The International Space Station is back in our evening skies, and on Sunday evening the big contraption will be flying up the East Coast and almost directly over Baltimore. (And even more directly over Ocean City.)
The weather forecast is quite promising for this pass, and the station will appear especially bright, even in badly light-polluted urban settings. It's also a convenient early-evening pass, so sky watchers will have no excuse not to step outside with the kids and get a look at your (and their) tax dollars at play.
The only hitch is that on this pass the ISS will fly into the Earth's shadow and disappear well before reaching the northeast horizon, cutting short our view, which of course depends entirely on sunlight reflecting off the hardware.
Watch for the station as it rises above the southwest horizon at 6:14 p.m. It will appear like a bright star, hustling across the sky. If you see blinking strobes, multiple or colored lights, that's a airplane. Keep looking.
The ISS will pass well above the planet Jupiter, which is now the brightest object in the southern sky. It will reach a maximum elevation of 70 degrees above the southeastern horizon at 6:17 p.m., and soon after that fade quickly away as it enters the Earth's shadow - another brief nighttime for crew aboard the station.
There are currently six crew members aboard the ISS. They include two Americans (one male, one female); two Russians; one Belgian (the first European expedition commander) and one Canadian, all male.
They are currently preparing for the scheduled arrival of the Space Shuttle Atlantis on Nov. 16. The flight, to deliver spare parts to the station, is one of the last six shuttle flights on the NASA manifest before the fleet is retired in 2010. After that, under current plans, the U.S. will have to rely on Russian vehicles to support the station and its crew.
Note to Bucket Listers: If you have never seen a shuttle launch in person, start planning now to get down to Florida to watch one of these spectacular events before it's too late. TV images of a shuttle launch do not do the experience justice. You can't see that blinding flame, hear the crackling engines, or feel the sound in your chest.
And, with the cameras focused on the shuttle, you lose all sense of the space ship's acceleration and speed as it leaps into the air and disappears from view. You simply can't believe that people willingly ride that monster. Be there.






northwest Caribbean, and on toward the Gulf of Mexico over the weekend.
tender plants that are still outdoors tonight.
a close-up view of the heavens. One prominent target, I expect, will be the planet Jupiter, which is shining brightly high in the southern sky this month. Here it is in this NASA photo, with four of its moons.
town of Bluefields, and was expected to weaken over land. But forecasters are still predicting Ida will move back over water into the northwest Caribbean and restrengthen.
rains and 35-mph winds. It may well become the season's ninth tropical storm - Ida - later today.
Westminster, 32 in Shrewsbury, Pa., and in Poolesville, Md.
If they're right, observers in central and eastern Asia will have the best view, with meteor rates forecast to exceed several hundred per hour as we slip through the dust left by the comet during its passes through the inner solar system in the years 1466 and 1533.
I know it's too early in the season to be amusing readers with winter weather data. But the National Weather Service forecast office in Sterling has posted a compendium of winter weather facts for Baltimore, Washington and Dulles Airport, and it's a fun read if you're into Baltimore's annual love/hate relationship with snow, cold and ice.
Rainfall for the month totaled 6.24 inches. That's a surplus of more than 3 inches, and the
Marshall in those same four days.
remember the Veteran's Day storm on Nov. 11, 1987, which left an official 6 inches at BWI, but caused much more disruption than the number would suggest.
Forecasters out at Sterling say the problem has been the
Don't despair, Baltimore. The weather gods have been taking their time, but the cold front is moving off, and the cloud deck over our heads is about to pass off to the south and east of the city. 

to our south and rolls up the coast. But not yet.
