Last night, as I was watching TV, it occurred to me that a voice on the radio had said that at 8:23PM the International Space Station would zip across the night sky. It would be well lit by the setting sun and very impressive.

I don’t know when I heard this or why I remembered. I wake up to the news channel in the morning so it must have entered my subconscious mind while I was trying to crawl out of bed.

While watching TV last night (Big Bang Theory), I noticed that the time was 8:19PM, so I wandered outside just in time to watch the ISS streak across the sky. It lasted less than two minutes, rising over the trees in the north west, and dipping down below the trees in the south. It was very bright and moved very fast.

I was very moved. I knew that there were people living on that streak of light, hundreds of miles above the earth. They can only get there on space ships, and they live in zero gravity. It was a very sciencefictional experience.

Tonight, it will happen again at 8:47PM. This time I will bring Erica out to watch because she was disappointed that she missed it last night. It went by so fast that if I had gone back inside to get her, I would have missed it, too.

This website has the times that you can see the space station. It is particularly good right now because it passes over head at dusk, but it is still brightly lit by the sun.

Look towards the south west and you’ll see it rising almost straight up. It cuts across the southern sky, and sets almost due south, all in just a couple of minutes.

Human Space Flight (HSF) – Realtime Data.