I stepped outside this morning, as I normally do, to get the newspaper. The time was about 6 AM. I looked up at the sky and saw a bright object, nearly as bright as Venus (which is currently up in the morning and very, very bright), moving across the sky, flickering only as it would pass behind thin clouds. I watched it for a couple minutes until I couldn’t see it on account of the trees. I’ve seen objects move like that before, going from west to east and my first thought was: that’s the International Space Station.

I went inside, called up Sky Watch, a Java aplet that NASA has on one of their websites and entered the data. I was right: it was the ISS. Here’s what the aplet told me for my location in Lancaster:

Fri Sep 28@5:57:24 rise
Fri Sep 28@6:07:00 set

Max elevation (degrees) 36.7

It’s the first time I had seen it.

Made me happy.

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