Earth Fly over

[sidd finch]

Cool Stuff from the space station

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74mhQyuyELQ[/youtube]

[Dave McElderry]

A few weeks ago we had an ISS flyover that went nearly directly overhead and was extremely bright. They had a segment about it on our local news, so we made a point of going outside at the appropriate time and watched as it traversed the sky. It moves extremely fast - it was only visible for about 5 minutes from horizon to horizon. That motivated me to get a neat little app for my iPhone that tells when it will be visible for our location, and all the details such as magnitude, altitude, and azimuth. The really good passes don't happen that often, so it's nice to have the information at my fingertips. Of course there are websites that will give the same information. Don't know why it fascinates us the way it does, but we find it pretty cool. Got another very good one coming up early Wednesday morning.

[Steve Grisetti]

From the looks of that very cool video, the ISS has a polar orbit. Is that right? Does it go from North Pole to South Pole and around rather than east to west or vice versa?

[Dave McElderry]

Steve, here's some info I found which may be helpful.

The Station's celestial path is an oval-shaped path–an elliptical orbit, which varies from 218 miles (351 km) to 221 miles (356 km) from Earth. Going about 17,200 miles per hour, the Station circles Earth 16 times a day at an inclination (a measure of the tilt of the ISS' orbital plane) of 51.6 degrees to the equator. The Station eventually crosses almost every point on Earth: flying over 85% of the globe and 95% of its population.

And a link showing the orbital path:

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/tr ... index.html

[Chris B]

Very cool - I like the interpolated one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdDEpC0uHWI

Also the thunderstorms (at around 20 seconds for example) are fantastic.