Summer Satellites and the Great Scar

Well, Summer is supposedly here, though it's not always easy to tell in Portland. Not that I'm bitching - you can have the heat and sunlight. The only thing that is sort of a downer is that sky-watching is less fun when it's cold and limits the amount of time you want to spend gazing upwards from a lawn chair. That said, last Saturday was a pretty decent night and after BBQing, my girlfriend and I pulled out the tri-fold lawn chairs and watched the sky for a couple of hours.

It may sound cliché, but it's really hard to argue against how well Dark Side of the Moon goes with watching the countless satellites drift through the salted sky, peppered with the occasional meteorite. I wasn't looking for anything in particular and had no hopes of catching anything mysterious -- that's not why I stargaze. But there was one particularly bright object that we caught in the Northwest moving speedily towards the Southeast. It had a brightness of 4 and was quite stunning. After a brief What The Fuck moment, we both realized it was the ISS. We confirmed this later by an online tracker that gave the exact time and location in which we saw the object.

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