Satellites

The viewing and tracking of artificial satellites is one of the easiest nighttime viewing activities and requires nothing more than your eyes. Currently there are thousands of of man-made objects orbiting the earth which include military and commercial satellites, the International Space Station (ISS), the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and spent rocket bodies. All of these objects reflect sunlight which makes them visible at certain times to an observer on the earth. The brightest and and most easily viewed object is the ISS which can shine as bright as the planet Venus at magnitude -4.0. To get predictions of when objects may be visible from your location visit the website: Heavens-Above.

This photo shows a typical pass of the ISS. Details of the pass downloaded from the Heavens-Above website are pasted in the upper right corner of the photo. The photo was taken with a digital camera and wide-field lens mounted on a camera tripod. The photo is actually a composite of 12 separate 10-second time exposures with a 2 second gap between each exposure. This gives you a sense as to how fast the ISS is moving across the sky. You can see a bit of the “Milky Way” nebulosity running between the stars Deneb and Altair.
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In this photo the ISS just skims past the bottom of the bowl of the “Big Dipper”. The middle star of the handle is the double Star “Mizar”. If you zoom in on the photo you can make out its companion “Alcor”.
A graceful pass of the ISS taken from the” Castle” at Cherokee Ranch located in Daniels Park, Colorado.
This photo captures the Space Shuttle “Atlantis” and the International Space Station (ISS) flying in tandem in 2007. Hours earlier the Atlantis had undocked from the station in preparation for returning to earth. Dropping into a lower, and hence faster orbit, the Atlantis has pulled ahead of the space station with the moon shining below.