Last night the International Space Station (ISS) was visible to the naked eye in certain parts of the US. Here in Texoma we got a glimpse of it around 8:25 PM CT. It looked like a fast-moving bright light across the sky and it traveled much faster than a commercial jet.
The ISS circles Earth every 90 minutes. It travels at about 17,500 miles per hour, which gives the crew 16 sunrises and sunsets every day! Learn more about the ISS, its crew and research activities here.
If you missed seeing it last night, you’ll may still have a chance to see it over the next couple days, depending upon where you live. Here in Texoma we’ll be able to view it again on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights.
To see if the ISS will be traveling through your state, check out the Live Space Station Tracking Map here.
DCG
I saw it once, followed closely by the space shuttle (or was it the other way around?), somewhere in the mid-2000s. It was a little more difficult for me since I had light pollution to contend with at night, but dry air also helped.
Very cool indeed.
Sorry-no. Rainy and overcast here. 😢
Too much ground-light here in So.Cal where I live. When we lived in rural small-town Utah, without much night-time ground-light from human light sources, we could see EVERYTHING with the naked eye—Haley’s Comet when it came, all the Constellations in their seasons, and any manmade traveling object by the clock every night, like the Space Station or other satellites….It was awesome. Now I am lucky to see Orion, Ursa Major….certain planets with the naked eye when they are in “season” in So. Cal. BUT….I DID clock the Space Shuttles & got to see the Discovery land at Edwards once…camped out all night in a tent along the runway. I still have a Challenger magnet on my “fridge” that we got from a geehaw hawker on that trip so long ago. I’ll be able to tell my grandchild, maybe a great-grandchild one day about how Americans were once masters in Space before Obama and Biden killed the Space Program, handing it over to Russia and China…..