Same space station, twice the crew
When the International Space station flies over Baltimore Friday night, it may look the same to us as it did on Wednesday evening, but there will be twice as many eyeballs looking back down at 
us. Sometime around 8:30 a.m. Friday, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft (like the one at left), launched Wednesday, will dock with the station and unload the next three crew members to man the orbiting outpost. That will make six people on board.
NASA hopes the larger crew will enable additional scientific research aboard the station. With just three aboard, they spent most of their time just keeping the place going.
If skies clear in time, the flyover will be almost as bright as Wednesday's pass, which was probably the brightest I've ever seen it in years of observations. The trajectory will be nearly the same as Wednesday's.
Watch for the ISS to appear above the northwest horizon at 8:37 p.m. EDT as it passes over Lake Michigan.
From there it will climb above the crescent moon and Saturn, lower in the southwest, rising nearly to the zenith (straight up) at 8:40 p.m. From there - high over Washington DC - it will slide off toward the southeast, disappearing far out over the Atlantic at 8:44 p.m.
If you see it, stop back here and leave us a comment.
Comments
Although I missed the Wednesday flyover, I did catch a part of Friday's from Highlandtown. Friends and I were standing on the corner of Conkling and Gough and we saw the ISS for about minute as it was near the top of its arc. It was cool to see it even though the clouds obscured most of the show.
FR: Ain't urban astronomy grand? Some friends, my wife and I were in Fells Point on Saturday evening and got a fine view of Saturn through Herman Heyn's telescope. Baltimore's Streetcorner Astronomer had a pretty steady flow of people getting their first in-person look at the ringed planet.
Posted by: Doug | June 1, 2009 1:32 PM