Spot The Station:
Did you know you can see the International Space Station from your house? As the third brightest object in the sky, after the sun and moon, the space station is easy to see if you know where and when to look for it.
NASA’s Spot the Station service sends you an email or text message a few hours before the space station passes over your house.
This is kind of a neat idea, especially if the emails give you enough time to get outside and to a good, non-lit location.
Where I’m from, we talk to the station, and it talks back! We do this every year.
How do you do that?
There’s a fine iOS app that gives ISS visibility dates, times and maps for any location. Check it out; it’s called “ISS Visibility”
What I do is follow @twisst. It’s a twitter profile that sends you a tweet a few hours before the ISS cross the sky where your twitter account says you are. It gives you all the directions, like the timing, duration, from where it’ll come, where it’s heading, brightness magnitude. It’s really awesome. I had never managed to see the ISS before it. Now I just gather people here at work and drag everyone outside to watch it fly by. haha
The SkyView app for the iPhone will also show you where it is.
Yep. I use it to help figure out from where its coming.
While I was a student at Pune, India we saw it once, after dusk in 2007 with the naked eye. Back then we had to rely on the institute’s science outreach advisor to keep us posted on the time and visibility. 🙂