Last night I took Shelby outside for her next-to-last visit to the backyard for the evening. I was leaning against the side of our garage looking at the slice of night sky that is visible between the two houses across the back lane. I noticed two really bright stars and I thought to myself, “That’s odd to see two bright stars so close together.”
Normally there are a handful of bright stars on display that really stand out, highlighted against a multitude of stars that are at least semi-veiled from view due to the lights of the city. At various times of the year local solar system planets park themselves in an orbit that makes them visible to the naked eye. In other words, they show up looking like bright stars in Earth’s evening blackness.
I thought these two bright objects must be a planet and a star, or two planets in complementary orbits. I watched them for a few seconds; then I turned to see what Shelby was up to, then back again to the stars. I could swear that one of the bright objects had moved in relation to the electrical power line that crossed my field of vision. I looked at it more critically this time, with specific focus on its suspected travel.
It was indeed moving. Next I had to determine what it was. I had a pretty good idea in mind already. As it approached I detected no blinking lights, which would have been the tell-tale signs of an aircraft.
The reason I was somewhat confidant that I was watching the International Space Station (ISS) is that I saw it on Saturday early evening at Ambleside Park when I was at the Summer Sessions concert. The only difference was that on Saturday night it was traveling from South West to North East, and tonight its trajectory took it from West to East.
The thing that intrigued me the most the other night, and again this night, was that I wasn’t able to watch its whole arc across the sky. I thought I’d be able to follow along until the ISS was obscured from view by the roofs of houses, but it faded from view long before that. I was craning my neck almost straight up when the ISS started to become dimmer and dimmer. In a matter of seconds it was entirely cloaked in inky blackness.
I kind of felt like a scientist at that point, putting an experiment through its paces in hopes of finalizing a thesis, or verifying an assumption. The first time I had witnessed the ISS fade from view before it could cross the horizon line was Saturday night, and now I had my confirmation; for reasons yet unknown the ISS traverses a portion of the visible night sky, visible to all that look up, and then fades when it reaches a certain altitude, or orbit, or intersection of the sun’s rays in the upper atmosphere.
I know I could look it up on the Internet if I felt like it, but I’m really more what you’d call an 'armchair astronomer'. I like looking at the night sky, the darker the better, but I’m not interested enough to crack an astronomy text book and actually study it. Somehow for me, knowing the answers to some of nature’s celestial charades (i.e. orbits) would take away from the wonder of the moment.
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