Here’s my first shot of the International Space Station (ISS) passing over Amsterdam (taken at 19:00 UTC on March 07, 2010). The station passed right through the constellation Orion only a fraction of a degree north of the Orion’s belt.
ISS Above Amsterdam crossing the constellation of Orion - (4 subframes exp. 10s f/5.6 ISO 1600 each, stacked with RegiStax)
The ISS will be visible in Amsterdam until March 20 and the next visibility window will start on April 10. Below is the list of the “best” passes over the city:
* all times are in CET (UTC+1) and represent the moment when the station’s elevation is 10°.
Source: Heavens-Above.com
For more information about (visible) passes of ISS, and satellites, not only in Amsterdam but for any place on Earth, visit the heavens above website. You can also follow @twisst on twitter.
Before the Space Shuttle Endeavour docked with the International Space Station at 05:06 UTC, the camera outside of the station captured this beautiful sunset on orbit with the orbiter seen against the horizon of the Earth. At that point, Endeavour was on a rendezvous course behind the station at the distance of about 8.2 km orbiting the Earth at an altitude of roughly 346 km.
February 7, 2010 at 09:30 UTC, NASA’s launch director (LD) Pete Nickolenko Mike Leinbach coordinating with the Mission Management Team (MMT) called off today’s launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavor on the STS-130 mission during the final T-9 minute hold while polling stations for the Go/No-Go for launch, due violations in launch weather criteria ending thus a “full dress launch rehearsal” for the crew of STS-130.
The main culprit today was the range weather, i.e. low clouds over the launch page. In addition to the launch site weather violations, the Mission Control in Houston also called a No-Go due to unacceptable weather forecast for a possible Return To Launch Site (RTLS) abort.
The teams will execute a 24 hour scrub turnaround procedure and attempt another launch tomorrow. The launch window tomorrow will open at 09:09:02 UTC and closes at 09:19:02 UTC with the optimal launch time at 09:14:07 UTC.
The T-9 min in-built starts - Photo Credit: NASA TV/Spacevidcast
Space shuttle Endeavour, STS-130, is bathed in light on launch pad 39A Saturday, February 7, 2010 awaiting blastoff to the International Space Station Sunday morning at 4:39 am. - Credit: Red Huber/Orlando Sentinel
This is really cool! In the video below, astronaut Jeff Williams demonstrates the acceleration experienced inside the cabin during a planned International Space Station reboost on January 24, 2010.
Astronaut Jeff Williams demonstrates the acceleration experienced inside the cabin during a planned International Space Station reboost on January 24, 2010.
At 350km above Earth’s surface the vacuum of space is not perfect and the International Space Station is constantly slowed down by drag. Although the drag is really small the station’s orbital height can drop by 20 km in a year. Without periodic reboost maneuvers the station would become a big fireball in just a few years. The ISS is also reboosted to prepare for visiting spacecraft, such as the space shuttle and Progress vehicles.
The orbital height of the ISS over the last year. Clearly visible are the re-boosts which suddenly increase the height, and the gradual decay in between. The height is averaged over one orbit, and the gradual decrease is caused by atmospheric drag - Credit: Heavens-Above.com
As can be seen from the plot, the rate of descent is not constant and this variation is caused by changes in the density of the tenuous outer atmosphere mainly due to changes in solar activity.
Originally, I planned to continue my ISS above London series although now it would be renamed to ISS above Amsterdam. Unfortunately, I missed tonight’s fly over between 17:41:57 and 17:48:47 GMT when the ISS passed only a few degrees south of the Moon.
Fortunately, freezing out on the roof terrace wasn’t a complete waste of time as I managed to take the following shot of the crescent Moon [click to embiggen].
Photo of waxing crescent Moon taken tonight through a refractor ATC Monar (D=70mm f/4.6) with Canon 450D, exp. 1/50s
In the photo above, 25% of the surface is illuminated. At the time, the Moon was at the distance of 400,438 km only a few hours after reaching the apogee (January 20, 2010 at 14:55 GMT). Chromatic aberration, caused by the failure of the primary lens to focus all colors to the same point due to different refractive index for different wavelengths of light, is noticeable on the edges (green in the bottom left, red in bottom right, and blue in top right) but quite obvious in the original (uncropped) image [~2mb] with the resolution of 4272px x 2848px.
As there is no need for colors in lunar images, I was quite happy to “correct” the chromatic aberration by setting the image [click to embiggen] to gray-scale:
Grayscale photo of waxing crescent Moon taken tonight (eq and exp. details same as above)
