Looking at the ISS has never been better!

[starfinder]

Thanks Gavin...cool...I've never seen it before. So its 8pm, due NNW and around 65 deg above horizon? That should be above the horizon clouds although that area near my place is always cloudy...

Hi Rich,

The trajectory of the ISS on Wednesday 29 Aug would be:
At 20:03:31 10 deg altitude, bearing NNW
At 20:06:22 65 deg altitude, bearing ENE
At 20:07:18 36 deg altitude, bearing ESE
Mag. -2.4

Therefore, it will first appear at 8:03pm in the NNW, and then rise to a peak at 8:06pm in ENE at an altitude of 65 degrees. Then disappear at 8:07pm in the ESE at 36 degrees (disappear because it then enters Earth's shadow).

Further details of the pass can be found here:

http://www.heavens-above.com/PassDetail ... 5044241508

And a ground track plot can be seen here:
http://www.heavens-above.com/gtrack.asp ... atid=25544


When at its peak at 8:06pm, it will be about 378km distance from Singapore (set at Holland-Village), flying somewhere above the Pulau Tioman region.

Interestingly, that means that if we can see some details of its shape through a telescope at 378km (likely since we've seen it before), we could, were it not for the curvature of the Earth, also see the shape of the Petronas Towers, since KL is also about that distance from Singapore! Would the height of the Towers's peak be sufficient to exceed the Earth's intervening curvature? Anyone here thinks it may be possible to see the Petronas Towers from Singapore? Perhaps another factor would be atmospheric opacity. Hmmmm.....

[yanyewkay]

65deg up is good. just hope no more cloudy nights

[Airconvent]

wow...practically a blink of an eye and its gone. which is puzzling because it can't possibly be staying on the other side of the planets 99% of the time right? :roll:

[Airconvent]

Confound it! I was trapped at work tonight and had to settle for the cloudy skies in Tuas area and did not manage to see it. A quick sms made me feel even worse...he reported seeing it clearly...good for him!
Have to wait for the next one then...

[starfinder]

I saw the ISS clearly on Wednesday evening, but did not manage to image it properly.

With the naked-eye (actually it is not quite accurate to say "naked eye" as I wear optics to correct for myopia), the ISS was very bright, perhaps as bright or even brighter than Venus. It seemed to exhibit a certain disc size or shape, rather than being a pin-point like the stars.

I had hooked up a web-cam (used for planetary imaging) to my LX-90, and entered the coordinates into the Autostar system. The LX-90 was indoors in my room. However, as I could not see the ISS appear on the north-western side, I did not press to start the tracking on time. Then, as the ISS sailed over-head, I lost track of it. Eventually, I could not get it into the field of view of the telescope, except for less than half a second as the scope's view ran past it. The result was a single video frame of the ISS as a long smear.

Oh well, I will have to try again, probably outdoors. But that would involve hauling out a lot of equipment.

The next ISS pass over Singapore would be on early Tuesday morning (4th Sept) at around 6:10am, when the ISS would reach a very high altitude of 73 degrees. Details here:
http://www.heavens-above.com/PassDetail ... 9251976521

[acc]

Thanks to Gavin's alert, I managed to see it bright and clear from Labrador Park. Not sure if I was seeing things but I thought the ISS appeared not just as a bright dot, but rather more like a binary star with one very bright component and a much dimmer one. The ISS indeed appeared as bright as or even brighter than Venus.

[Airconvent]

with so few minutes visually, I had assumed it would be moving very fast, like a satellite? :roll:

cheers

[acc]

eh this is so hard to describe... it appears to be a few times as fast as the apparent speed of an a/c at high-altitude. or maybe a few seconds to travel 10 deg across the sky.