Blogtrek

Kugel and the International Space Station

Last night I went to a meeting of the Richmond Astronomical Society. Afterwards, a bunch of us congregated at the Science Museum of Virginia, where the meeting was held, to look at the Earth water kugel. This is a huge, 45-ton or so ball resting on a fountain so that it is supported by the water. The kugel can be spun on this as the water cushion behaves like Teflon. Some of us wanted it to stay still and point at an angle of 23 degrees, so that it was oriented like the real Earth. Not only that we wanted it to spin precisely at the same rate the Earth spins. But later at night I gave the globe a few good heaves and it was spinning rapidly on an axis that was not the polar axis.

We hung around a little later because someone found on the web that the International Space Station (ISS) was going to make a pass at 2133 (9:33 pm) on 2003 June 9. At 2132, sure enough, between the eyes of Gemini (Castor and Pollux), the station appeared. It was brighter than Arcturus but fainter than Jupiter. It passed from right to left, towards the south, and went high, near where the moon was. It came within a moon's radius of Spica, then it went on down to the southern horizon and winked out when it hit the Earth's shadow. It was worth waiting on a work night to see. I had seen the Shuttle and ISS before but every time is a sight to behold. A steady beacon (not flashing like an airplane) drifting across the sky, brighter than just about anything else in the sky, something that our grandparents never saw during their youth. Like the Mars probe, it beckons us out to space, to make it a station on our way to exploring the heavens.