The Hunt for Space Station Flares

William Atkins
Wednesday, 27 May 2009 17:26

Science - Space

Sky watchers around the world have been seeing a treat lately as they witness strong, but unpredictable, flares coming off the recently enlarged International Space Station as it flies across their local night sky.


SpaceWeather.com is reporting that “During some nighttime flybys, the luminosity of the space station surges 10-fold or more. Some people have witnessed flares of magnitude -8 or twenty-five times brighter than Venus.”

An amateur astronomer from Vaassen, the Netherlands, Quintus Oostendorp, caught a video of the ISS flaring as it moved across his Dutch sky on May 22, 2009.

See the movie on http://spaceweather.com. Oostendorp used a Canon 1000D camera hooked up to his backyard telescope.

The movie shows the cause of the flares. Sunlight is impinging on the solar arrays of the Space Station.

The solar arrays were recently added to the ISS by a previous NASA space shuttle mission. In all, eight solar arrays, orange in color, are attached to the International Space Station.

SpaceWeather.com states, “… sunlight glints from the station's recently expanded solar arrays in a shadow-casting flash.” Some observers say that the Space Station looks redder after the addition of the last set of solar arrays.

However, you may not see the flares each time you observe the ISS. Sometimes they happen, while at other times they don’t.

Page two tells you where to find out when the Space Station crosses your local night sky.