What just blew you away?

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Wow. Wow. Wow. Yep, blew me away.
:notworthy:

Yup.

I love it when that happens

This morning before sunrise, I got to see a satellite cross the sky.
With the full moon, Jupiter and Venus all so brightly lit up,
this new brilliant light moving across the sky was almost startling.

The satellite went from upper right to lower left in this map, and passed just
below Alnitak (marked with a circle) and Alnitan (middle star) in Orion's belt.

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Silly to be excited by what now must be a common event, but it blew me away !

It's fun spotting them. The Iridium ones are especially cool. They are very bright and fast. Can only be seen just after sunset or just before sunrise because they are so low.

The Space Station is also very exciting to see. You can go to Heavens Above to see when various ones will go over your location.

that's a good link. i'm bookmarking it

Glatt, thanks for the link. I registered and am gradually finding my way around the site.

BTW, I was out walking earlier this morning (5:35 PDT) and saw the satellite go by again.
This time it was almost directly overhead. I'm still blown away by it's brightness...
and because I'm used to planes flying overhear I expect to hear the sound of jets.
But at that time of the morning it is very quite around here,
and there is no sound from the satellite (duh).

Again, it may be silly to be excited by such an event,
but I've been out walking in the early mornings for years,
and not seen/noticed such passages before.

Not silly at all. Image what the cavemen would think if they saw today's satellites going by.

I wish I understood that link: how can you tell where the space station is?

infinite monkey;832660 wrote:

I wish I understood that link: how can you tell where the space station is?

When you register at the site, you can enter your location.
Then when you click on the satellite-of-interest, you can then
see a star-map that shows it's track across the sky, and you
can also see a ground-path showing it crossing over your location.

The ground-path was easiest for me to understand because I don't
know the names of the stars well enough to immediately locate them.

Cool, thanks.

At my brothers cabin in the hills we could see satellites. I didn't even know what they were until my brother pointed one out.

glatt;832649 wrote:

Not silly at all. Image what the cavemen would think if they saw today's satellites going by.

They would prolly think:

"That's the most retardedly slow shooting star I've ever seen."

"Great Argoo has been eating the fermented yellowfruits tonight."