When I was a youngster growing up in the Throggs Neck section of The Bronx, the Hayden Planetarium had a service called Dial-a-Satellite.  When you called a special phone number, you could hear a recorded message telling you when and where to look for the brightest naked-eye satellites that occasionally tracked across our local New York skies.  Back then (and I'm speaking now about the mid-1960s) the only really bright satellites readily visible were actually two giant Mylar balloons... measuring about 100-feet in diameter which orbited Earth at altitudes of about 1000 miles.

These were the Echo passive communications satellites: they actually functioned as reflectors, not transmitters. After being placed in orbit around the Earth, a signal would be relayed to one of the two Echo satellites, which were reflected or bounced off its surface, then returned to Earth. The Echo satellites were easily visible to the eye because of their highly reflective surface, but also because of their low orbits; they would appear from below one side of the horizon, cross the sky, then disappear below the opposite horizon after crossing the sky, as happens with all low Earth orbiting satellites. These spacecraft were nicknamed satelloons by those involved in the project. Today, those two Echo satellites are long-gone, but there are now literally thousands of satellites orbiting our Earth.

By far and away, the biggest object now orbiting our Earth is the International Space Station.  And if our skies are reasonably clear on Saturday, November 22, we here in the Tri-State Area will have a great opportunity to see the ISS make a long, high pass across the evening twilight sky.

It will be moving along a track that will take it roughly from Washington to just north of New York and then on toward Boston and the Gulf of Maine; it will briefly overfly our region about an hour after sundown.

It always amazes people when they are told that they can actually see the Space Station—now orbiting 218 miles above Earth—with their own two eyes; no optical aid is needed.  As big as a football field, the ISS is visible by virtue of sunlight shining on its metallic skin and large solar panels.  To the unaided eye it appears as a very bright star that does not twinkle and shines with a slight yellowish-white tinge. Check out this short video of it when it passed over Gloucester, Massachusetts back on Christmas Eve, 2006.

Some assiduous astronomers have even been able to photograph the actual structure of the Space Station by tracking it with their telescope:

On Saturday, the ISS will emerge from above the southwest horizon at 5:32 p.m. Prepare yourself for this ISS pass by getting outside some minutes before it's due to appear and getting yourself acclimated to the sky and the surrounding stars.  Certainly, you will immediately notice two very bright, non-twinkling silvery stars low in the southwest.  They are not stars, but planets; the brighter and lower of the two is Venus, the other will be Jupiter.  Make a fist and hold it out at arm's length.  When the ISS first appears, it should be roughly "two fists" to the right of Jupiter and Venus.  It will appear to move straight up to a point almost directly overhead.  It will then drop down toward the northeast, disappearing about 3-minutes after it first appeared, near to the northeast horizon.  It actually will seem to rapidly fade out toward the end of its track as it moves into the Earth's shadow.

As to just how bright it should get, it should be plainly visible even from brightly lit cities; only Venus and perhaps Jupiter will be brighter.  So during it's 3-minutes of visibility, the Space Station will be one of the three brightest objects in the sky!

And keep in mind that as you look at it, there are ten people who are currently onboard.  Three are semi-permanent residents, staying for upwards of six months on the ISS.  The other seven just recently arrived on the Space Shuttle Endeavour which was launched from Florida on November 14.  The Shuttle is currently docked to the ISS and is scheduled to return to Earth on November 29.

Pretty neat, huh? Tell all your neighbors... and take the kids out for a look.

I'll be interested to see how many plan to check it out, so drop me a line if you see it.

People in the eastern United States will get a great opportunity, weather permitting, to see the Space Shuttle Endeavour launched into orbit Friday evening, November 14.

The Shuttle flight (STS-126) will be the 27th to rendezvous and dock with the International Space Station (ISS) and the glow of its engines will be visible along much of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.

To reach the ISS, Endeavour must be launched when Earth's rotation carries the launch pad into the plane of the ISS's orbit. For mission STS-126, on November 14 that will happen at 7:55:34 p.m. EST, resulting in NASA's fourth Shuttle flight of 2008 and the second nighttime launch this year. This launch will bring the Shuttle's path nearly parallel to the U.S. East Coast.

What to expect

For most locations, Endeavour will be visible by virtue of the light emanating from its three main engines. It should appear as a very bright, pulsating, fast-moving star, shining with a yellowish-orange glow.

Based on previous night missions, the brightness should be at least equal to magnitude -2; about as bright as the planet Jupiter, which is currently shining in the southwestern evening sky.  Observers who train binoculars on the Shuttle should be able to see it resemble a tiny V-shaped contrail.

In the Southeast United States, depending on a viewer's distance from Cape Canaveral, Discovery will become visible anywhere from a few seconds to 2 minutes after it leaves Pad 39-A.  The brilliant light emitted by the two solid rocket boosters will be visible for the first 2 minutes and 4 seconds of the launch out to a radius of some 520 statute miles from the Kennedy Space Center.

No matter where you're located, keep in mind that the Shuttle will not get very high above the horizon.  In most cases, it will range from roughly 5 to 10 degrees.  To get an idea of how high this is, make a fist and hold it out at arm's length.  Place the bottom of your fist on the horizon; the top of your fist is 10 degrees

By location:

Southeast U.S. coastline:

Anywhere north of Cape Canaveral, I suggest viewers initially concentrate on the south-southwest horizon (if you are south of the Cape, look low toward the north-northeast).

Mid-Atlantic region:

Look toward the southwest about 3 to 6 minutes after launch.

Northeast (Washington, Philadelphia, New York, Boston):

Concentrate your gaze low toward the south or south-southwest about 6 to 8 minutes after launch. Of course, as the shuttle gets closer, its azimuth very quickly swings over to the southeast, where in most cases, the point of maximum altitude occurs. I suspect most people will be scanning the horizon from south-southwest to southeast in the final couple of minutes of powered ascent . . . if so, you shouldn't miss out on sighting Endeavour.

Endeavour will seem to flicker, then abruptly wink-out 8 minutes and 23 seconds after launch as the main engines shut-down and the huge, orange, external tank is jettisoned over the Atlantic at a point about 870 statute miles uprange (to the northeast) of Cape Canaveral and some 430 statute miles southeast of New York City. At that moment, Endeavour will have risen to an altitude of 341,600 feet (64.7 statute miles), while moving at nearly 17,000 mph and should be visible for a radius of about 770 statute miles from the point of Main Engine Cut Off, or MECO.

Should the launch of Endeavour be scrubbed on Friday, November 14, the launch will be rescheduled on a daily basis, but the time of the launch will occur roughly 23 minutes earlier for each day the launch is delayed (launch window times through November 26).

Before hoping to see the Shuttle streak across your local sky, make sure it has left the launch pad!  Watch a news outlet such as CNN, MSNBC or FOX to verify that Endeavour has been launched.  You can also watch the launch on your computer via streaming video from NASA-TV.

Good Luck!

A good friend of mine, Joel Moskowitz of Long Island is (like me) hopelessly addicted to traveling anywhere in the world to view a total eclipse of the Sun. On Friday, August 1, I saw my tenth eclipse, but Joel is two ahead of me with 12.  And every time totality ends, Joel always says the same thing:

Let's do it again!

I joined 146 observers from around the world for a perfect view of the August 1st total eclipse, thanks to an 2,189-mile airlift to a grandstand seat 36,000-feet above the Arctic Ocean at a point between the uninhabited northern coast of Greenland and the Norwegian island group of Svalbard.

The contingent of eclipse watchers were onboard an Airbus A330-200 long-range jet, racing the moon's shadow like paparazzi scrambling alongside a celebrity's passing automobile. The aircraft's 555-mile-per-hour speed (Mach 0.85) provided 175-seconds of total eclipse for all onboard passengers to take pictures and record other data.  In contrast, persons on a stationary ship on the Arctic sea below would have seen—provided no clouds blocked the view—the moon's 139-mile wide shadow speed past them at 2,740 mph, providing a noticeably shorter total eclipse lasting 132 seconds.

No planetarium in the world could have produced so impressive a natural spectacle as the sun and moon did in the cobalt-blue heavens; although the sight lasted less than 3 minutes, the fantastically beautiful skyscape more than repaid all of us; in fact we had to be up before dawn to ready ourselves for a round-trip flight of 12 hours.

The adventure began nearly six hours earlier in Dusseldorf, Germany and was arranged by the air charter company Deutsche Polarflug (AirEvents) which has operated previous successful over-flights of the North Pole with this same aircraft. Dr. Glenn Schneider, from the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory, on hand for his 27th total eclipse, worked out the flight plan to rendezvous with the moon's shadow. Glenn and I grew up in the Bronx and we've known each other for 35-years.

The flight itself was unique in the annals of solar eclipse chasing since there were no other records of any total eclipse observations in such close proximity (approximately 500-miles) from the North Pole.  Utilizing Glenn's data, Captain Wilhelm Heinz, maneuvered the aircraft into the track of the moon's dark shadow.  Our jet, surmounted more than 75-percent of the atmosphere (in terms of mass) and almost all of its water vapor below, providing an opportunity to see what happens in the Earth's upper atmosphere when the sun is switched off, so to speak. Minutes before totality, the light inside the cabin faded, much in the same manner as lights in a theater dim before the start of a show.

As the last of the sun's rays slipped behind the jagged lunar edge it produced a beautiful and long-lasting Diamond Ring effect. The dark lunar shadow then swept in from the west and enveloped the plane in an eerie darkness.  The sun's beautiful corona heralded the beginning of the total phase.  It appeared to throw off several long streamers—typical for a corona at sunspot minimum, which is where solar activity is now.

Adding to this scene was an array of four bright planets arranged to the lower left of the darkened sun: Mercury, Venus, Saturn and Mars.  Some of us searched near the sun for a small, faint comet that was discovered on satellite imagery some hours before the eclipse.  But no evidence of it was observed.

Glenn's experiments dealt in part with the density of plasma within the solar corona, and especially how it is heated to millions of degrees. Plasma is a gas in which normal atoms have been stripped of some or all of their electrons, thus becoming ions.  This commonly occurs in extremely hot gases such as the solar corona.  The plasma in the corona is strikingly similar to the plasma that would have to be heated, compressed and refined in a fusion reactor here on Earth, and the irregular behavior of the sun's corona might hold clues to the proper design of a workable fusion reactor.

Glenn was collaborating with Jay Pasachoff of Williams College in Massachusetts who was stationed in Siberia for the eclipse.  He utilized a platform controlled by two gyros that carried several cameras for recording eclipse images.  They previously collaborated on a similar observation over the Antarctic in 2003.

After the eclipse, Captain Heinz flew our aircraft to a point directly above the North Pole, then we headed back to Dusseldorf.

On Saturday, August 2nd (my birthday), I headed back to New York. Unfortunately, I arrived more than 4-hours late after having my flight from Germany re-routed first (unsuccessfully) to Boston and then to Bangor, Maine.  We sat on the tarmac for an hour while they refueled the plane.  Then, we headed back to JFK.  Apparently, extensive delays in the wake of thunderstorms from earlier in the day was the reason for our unscheduled detour to New England.  Most of the folks onboard the plane were German and had no clue where Bangor was.  The guy who was next to me spoke pretty good English and so he served as a translator for most of the people sitting around us as I explained that Bangor was a city much smaller than Boston, located about 250 kilometers farther away to the north and east.  There was a nervous murmur in the crowd and then one guy commented: Mit dieser et uns zurück zu Deutschland! (At this rate, they'll be sending us back to Germany!).

I was on that plane for 12-hours; and the day before I was on the Eclipse Flight, also for 12-hours!  The next total solar eclipse will be on July 22nd of next year and will sweep across India, China and the south islands of Japan.  You might wonder if all the time and miles expended is worth a view of a darkened Sun for a few precious minutes?

My answer?

Let's do it again!