ISS/STS-133

[george7378]

Hi everyone,

I just thought I'd also do a little write up of what I saw. The cloud was making it look like a no-go, but I noticed a little gap just down on the western horizon, with clear skies up to about the altitude of Jupiter. I checked heavens-above, but I think the TLE was a little out, because it said that the Shuttle and station would be passing over within about 7 minutes of eachother, which was obviously wrong.

I was with my dad, and we watched the launch earlier, and also saw the ISS pass over on the night of the launch, so we really wanted to get a sighting of this rare event. We went down to the end of the drive to get a good view of the western horizon at about 18:25, but the station did not come until about 18:35, so we had a little wait. The horizon was still quite bright, and I feared that I may miss it if I didn't keep a constant lookout. Because of the strange Shuttle predictions on heavens-above, when we finally did see a solitary point of light cutting through the twilight, I thought that we had missed the Shuttle and were looking at the station.

It was flickering quite a bit, and I only spotted it before it went behind a bit of cloud, but we got a lovely view of it as it passed about the height of Jupiter. It was only when I got in that I found out that it was actually both of them that we saw - that made my evening, when I thought that I'd missed the Shuttle!

Now that I've seen that most special of sights, I will try and get a look at them through my telescope.