![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The advantage to marrying an astronomer
Mar. 31st, 2005 10:19 pmI saw the HST tonight! For those who are only marginally interested in astronomy, HST is the Hubble Space Telescope. We had dinner with my parents tonight (Russ is heading home Friday night, she has to work Sunday night) and picked them up and took them home. As we were leaving, Russ was looking at the sky and spotted a dot moving across the sky. It could have been an aircraft but it wasn't blinking. We noted the time (about 8:25pm local) and went home. She pulled up the orbital data on Hubble and confirmed that was what we saw.
It just so happened that I had the latitude/longitude of Glendale College on hand since I'm writing a speech on Geocaching for my public speaking course. The college is about six miles West of my parent's house, representing a difference of perhaps a tenth of a degree error. More than close enough. That data gave her the starting point to figure out what we saw.
So that was pretty cool.
She saw the International Space Station (ISS) once while at the observatory with her bare eye, being a good 8000' above Phoenix with a clear sky makes it a lot easier to see cool stuff. This was particularly cool as the shuttle was docked at the time. Or so she says. :-)
It just so happened that I had the latitude/longitude of Glendale College on hand since I'm writing a speech on Geocaching for my public speaking course. The college is about six miles West of my parent's house, representing a difference of perhaps a tenth of a degree error. More than close enough. That data gave her the starting point to figure out what we saw.
So that was pretty cool.
She saw the International Space Station (ISS) once while at the observatory with her bare eye, being a good 8000' above Phoenix with a clear sky makes it a lot easier to see cool stuff. This was particularly cool as the shuttle was docked at the time. Or so she says. :-)
