Skywatchers: Check out double-flyby of Discovery, ISS

by William Atkins

Thursday, 12 June 2008

Between Wednesday, June 11, and Friday, June 13, 2008, the NASA space shuttle Discovery and the International Space Station will be seen flying in tandem over the night skies in various parts of Earth. See if you are included in the sighting!

Check out to see if you will be able to see them flying across the night sky at: SpaceWeather.

According to NASA, the southeastern parts of the United States will have the best viewing of the tandem flybys in the United States.

Space shuttle Discovery departed the International Space Station at 7:42 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) (1142 GMT) on Wednesday for its trip back home to planet Earth.

NASA astronaut and STS-124 pilot Ken Ham pulled the shuttle away from its Harmony docking port as it and the ISS were about 210 miles (340 kilometers) above the southern part of the Pacific Ocean, east of Australia.

If you are in Atlanta, Georgia, you will be able to see the pair, Wednesday night, begin to rise in the west-north-west sky at 9:01:30 p.m. local time and sink under the horizon at 9:03:52 p.m.

Their maximum elevation will be about 74 degrees, and they will be seen very brightly in the sky (a magnitude of -2.9).

Further south at Miami, Florida, you will see the ISS and Discovery fly over on Wednesday night at 9:03:44 p.m. (north-north-west sky), on Thursday night at 9:26:04 p.m. (west-north-west), and Saturday night at 8:35:10 p.m. (west-north-west).

However, the best time to see it (its brightest) is on Wednesday.

[Please note: Spaceweather.com may be wrong with its Saturday sighting time. The landing of the space shuttle Discovery is currently scheduled at the Kennedy Space Center for Saturday morning, June 14, 2008, at 11:15 a.m. EDT (1514 GMT), ahead of the Saturday night sighting noted at many locations on Earth by SpaceWeather.com. I have sent an email to the webmaster at Spaceweather.com to confirm or deny the discrepancy. I have not seen a delay notice of the STS-124 landing, which may explain the perceived problem if it indeed as occurred. More details as I get them.]

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