My delightful friend golux_org, among his other excellent qualities, is an astronomy buff and a photographer. He posts a daily photo at http://photo.bluebrook.com/potd.html, which I read through its LJ feed, bluebrook_potd. Usually he posts (gorgeous) nature scenes, but today’s photo is of the ISS, with the shuttle docked, passing overhead on Saturday. As it happens, I was there when he took that photo, and it was pretty impressive. To my eyes, it looked about as bright as Venus, and it crossed about three quarters of the sky before rapidly dimming and disappearing as it entered Earth’s shadow. It was visible to us (given that trees and buildings blocked our view as it rose) for a minute or so.

On a related subject golux_org reminded me that our mutual friend dalek (a/k/a Marek), who works with the Clay Center Observatory, was one of the people who took this impressively detailed ground-based photo of the ISS and Atlantis during the previous shuttle mission to the ISS. Atlantis is docked to the bottom-left of the main space station body, between the two large groups of solar panels, mostly in shadow and pointed away (with the main engines pointed towards earth), so we’re looking at the rear of the shuttle. The ISS is well-lit. It’s worth clicking through the picture on that page to the higher-resolution version; you can see considerably more detail.

(BTW, my userpic for this post is the Hubble Space Telescope; nothing to do with the ISS.)