If the clouds part, Marylanders will get a chance to watch tonight as the International Space Station flys over Baltimore. There will be another opportunity on Saturday evening, but the weather forecast for that one is even less promising. There's a note about it all on the Weather Page of today's Sun, but I managed to edit in an error last night that some will find confusing. Here's how it should read:

"At 6:18 p.m. today, the station will appear in the northwestern sky, fly past the bright star Vega and climb high overhead before disappearing into the Earth's shadow at 6:21 p.m.   On Saturday, the station rises in the northwest at 5:25 p.m. and flies directly over Baltimore at 5:28 p.m. before vanishing in the southeast."

My apologies for the goof.

For those who haven't tried to watch the ISS on its passages over Baltimore, you are looking for a bright, steady, star-like object that is moving briskly across the sky, at about the speed of an airliner at high altitude. If it blinks, or has multiple, colored lights, it's an airplane. Keep looking.

The station is about 240 miles above the Earth's surface, orbiting at 17,500 mph. There are three astronauts on board. One of them is flight engineer Daniel Tani, whose mother was killed yesterday when her car was struck by a freight train. She was 90. Tani was informed by Mission Control. He will not return to Earth until January at the earliest.