[Friends_of_SSASTROS] Notes From The Field - Planes, Trains, and Space Stations

[Mike McCabe]

Friday, March 17th, 2023; St. Patrick's Day
It’s no secret that we live in a busy area of the world. Sometimesreferred to as the ‘Northeast Corridor’ of the United States, the place wherewe live is well known for its hustle, bustle, and go, go, go. Things never stopmoving around here, be it on the ground, in the sky, and even in the spacebeyond our atmospheric cocoon.
Take for instance the fine spring-like evening in March thatwas last night. As I stood out there looking at the sky there was a constantparade of aircraft flying in all directions overhead, the familiar sound of trainhorns blaring off in the distance as they near street crossings was happeningjust like it does every day and every night, and as I considered what I was justabout to do a neighbor’s car had just fired up to take him some place to dosome thing. We just don’t stop. It’s no different in space these days either.

Low-Earth orbit, or LEO for short, is a very busy place andgetting busier by the minute. In one of the more interesting mysteries ofmodern times, and accurate estimate of exactly how many satellites are parkedin LEO isn’t readily available. Part of the problem is that more objects arebeing added practically every day, and another is that space junk – a situationthat is becoming more problematic all the time – is considered a countable partof the LEO population. So, if you’d like a formidable challenge to keepyourself busy you might try inventorying every man-made object in low earthorbit. Good luck with that.

As controversial as the rapidly increasing population of LEOis to us astronomers, we still enjoy looking up and seeing things fly by overhead.Last night offered opportunities to see two of the brightest satellites in thesky go by, those being the International Space Station and the Chinese Tiangonspace station. They’re so bright because they’re two of the biggest objects upthere, and under the right conditions they can even overcome some cloud cover. TheISS shot below shows an example of this.
In this time-lapse capture of last night’s ISS pass, thespace station can just barely be seen above the tree top way below Orion, but as ittraveled from west to east and passed Sirius into thinner cloud cover it gotvery bright and presented itself as a diffuse glowing ball as it transited intothe northeast sky while bisecting the trail of two planes coming into Logan fortheir landings.
Just twenty minutes later the Chinese Tiangon station came along,and by then the sky had darkened more and also cleared up significantly, thusthe reason for so many more stars. It passed below the ‘V’ of the Hyades, aboveOrion’s head, above Procyon, and then faded as it reached the head of Hydra,appearing as though it had just been swallowed by the Sea Serpent. The planetrail in that photo is typical of outgoing craft from our local airports, perhapscarrying some lucky souls headed for the blessedly warm environs of Florida orthe Bahamas.

Depending on when you like your space station passes, be itearly mornings or early evenings, they always happen in groups on either end.We’re currently in an evening grouping, with some nice ones coming up thisweekend. 
I use Heaven’s Above for my pass predictions, but there are many toolsout there for getting this kind of information. As a service to your fellowclub members, why not share the one you use so others can check it out? Thatwould be nice, so do it, eh?

Keep Looking Up!

Mike McCabe

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://ssastros.org/pipermail/friends_of_ssastros_ssastros.org/attachments/20230317/b2466e00/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 1679062028734blob.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 5942578 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://ssastros.org/pipermail/friends_of_ssastros_ssastros.org/attachments/20230317/b2466e00/attachment.jpg>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 1679062069610blob.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 5532074 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://ssastros.org/pipermail/friends_of_ssastros_ssastros.org/attachments/20230317/b2466e00/attachment-0001.jpg>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 1679062105411blob.jpg
Type: image/png
Size: 60385 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://ssastros.org/pipermail/friends_of_ssastros_ssastros.org/attachments/20230317/b2466e00/attachment.png>