Backyard Observing
Frank Low, 1933-2009
June 22, 2009One Perseid
August 13, 2009
Last night I saw the space shuttle (STS-127) followed by the space station (ISS) at about 20:48 PDT from my backyard. The shuttle led the station by about 30 seconds about 10 hours after the undocking. The excellent Heavens Above web site was predicting a 6 second separation, but the shuttle had clearly dropped its orbit further leading to a faster trajectory. If you missed this double sighting (or even if you saw the duo), be sure to check out this excellent picture of the shuttle docked to the station transitting the Sun.
nwright
Ned Wright, 65 years old, is a professor at UCLA. He did far-infrared observations using a 102-cm balloon-borne telescope for his PhD thesis, and has since observed with the Kuiper Airborne Observatory, and the space-based COBE, WMAP, Spitzer and WISE missions.
