Blogtrek

A comet and the International Space Station

It is not publicized much except in astronomical circles but there are two fairly bright comets out there, NEAT and LINEAR. They are named after satellites. It does not mean that they are nice clean easy-to-understand bodies. I went out to try to find comet NEAT tonight at about 2004 May 13 2132. I could not find it at first (a Sky and Tel map suggests it is at the intersection of parallel lines drawn through the Gemini twins and Procyon), but then I caught onto something else: a moving yellow star in the west. I thought plane at first, but the light was steady, yellow, and moving steady with no noise or huge increase in brightness. So I thought this was the International Space Station. I followed it across the sky, going through the bowl of the Big Dipper, and then it disappeared in trees to the east of Ursa Major. I looked it up in http://www.heavens-above.com and found this line:

Date Mag Starts Max. Altitude Ends
Time Alt. Az. Time Alt. Az. Time Alt. Az.
13 May -0.6 21:31:23 10 SW 21:34:20 74 NW 21:37:21 10 NE

Sure enough, this was the International Space Station pass. I looked at the diagram at this site,
and it matched what I saw perfectly. So I saw the Station tonight, and what made it interesting was that I was not specially planning on looking for it; I just happened to see it serendipitously when I was looking for something else.

Oh, yes. I looked a little harder and I did find a smidgeon of light which I believe was the comet. Interesting but not as spectacular as Hyakutake or Hale-Bopp.

By the way, be CAREFUL when going to the Heavens Above website. I superaccented the hyphen above. It is important. If you omit it and/or get the extension wrong, you may wind up with a window in your face asking if you would like to change your default web page to such and such, and then it may start doing other evil things. Apparently someone has set up a trap to some spyware. I took care of the problem by killing every browser window on the screen with the Task Manager. So be careful and make sure that hyphen is in there!