Patty Winter wrote:

In article ,
flyguy wrote:

[older text deleted]


I too have very dark skies within a half hours drive from home so I
should make an effort to see the tool bag. It should be fairly easy to
locate with the ISS ahead of it by a few minutes.


Let us know if you succeed! I haven't tried yet. I'm not sure it
would be possible at my house even with binoculars. Maybe next time
I visit my friends in the Gold Country.

I just checked the ISS schedule and wouldn't you know it there won't be
any visible passes of the ISS in my area for almost three weeks. After
that all the passes will be in the morning for another two weeks or so
until it finally gets back into the evening sky. I guess I'll have to
stay up late some night near the end of this month. I'm not going to
bother with any passes that aren't close to the zenith. I figure it
would be hard enough to see when it's directly overhead.


I tried to see
'Suitsat' with no success. That's got to be the weirdest 'satellite' in
the history of man made earth orbiting objects.


Well, that and the tool bag. :-) Also, did you ever see the tethered
satellite that broke free from the shuttle in 1996? The tether was
about 12 miles long, making for a very strange sight moving across
the sky:

http://www.satobs.org/tss.html

Be sure to watch the video.

I remember seeing the video taken from the Shuttle when the tether broke
but it never occurred to me that it might be visible from the ground.
That would have been really neat to see.
I have seen the ISS and the Shuttle when they were very close to each
other, like a degree or so. But that still works out to about 20-miles.
I would like to see them when they are so close it would require
binoculars to seperate them. The Shuttle program will probably be over
before I might have the opportunity for that. About a year ago I saw the
Shuttle on the first orbit after it was launched. I was surprised by how
fast it was moving. That was because they were still in a low parking
orbit before boosting to the altitude of the ISS.



What was the first
identifiable satellite you ever saw? For me it was Echo-1A in the autumn
of 1960.


I, too, saw Echo I. I don't recall whether I saw anything before that.


BTW, Have you seen Hubble? I'm pretty sure I've seen it at least once.


Yeah, a few times. Haven't tried recently.

The next window for Hubble is coming up at the end of the month. There
will be a single pass on three consecutive evenings in my area. Maybe
the Shuttle will be at the Hubble then. That would make it much easier
to find it.

Bye