Sandscript -ISS

At last I have seen it, three times this week. On Monday night my other half came home to find our neighbour, smart phone in hand, gazing at the sky. He was waiting for the International Space Station and within a few seconds they were watching it appear over Ken's garage. I was most envious, but soon our smart phone had the app; all we had to do was figure out how to work it. On Wednesday night we speeded up a committee meeting and ushered everyone out of the house. By 9.48pm we were standing in the middle of the road, not sure which way to look, then decided to stumble through the dark house to the back garden. Between 9.50pm and 9.54pm we watched the bright light appear above our roof, arc across the sky then gradually fade before it reached the horizon.
I wrote about ISS in my November 1st 2013 Sandscript Blog, inspired by hearing Colonel Chris Hadfield's 'An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth' serialised on BBC Radio4.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
At the time, a visit to the NASA website got me interested in ISON 'Comet of the Century'.
After 4.5 billion years at the edge of the Solar system and 3.5 billion years plunging towards the Sun, ISON came within 750,000 miles of the Sun's surface in November and was lost. There would be no light show in the winter skies and I didn't get Hadfield's book for Christmas.
A loss for bloggers and writers, but not for scientists; in the same spirit as the International Space Station, Worldwide collaboration observing ISON has enabled a massive collection of data.
With our long wet winter the comet would no doubt have been hidden from us by heavy cloud.
Clear skies this week enabled us to watch the ISS on Friday and last night; its height above us the mileage it would take us to reach the north of England, the 92 minutes it takes to orbit the Earth the time many people spend commuting to work.