Startracker Florian Boyd
I know this guy here in Palm Springs named Florian, who’s somewhat of an amateur astronomy buff. He’s the guy you want to go to when you have questions about planets, stars and other things floating around in the night sky.
There’s also a mountain west of Palm Springs called Mt. San Jacinto, and near the top of it is this bright light that emanates from the Palm Springs Aerial Tram Station.
You can see it every night, and you can see the tiny little light of the tram car going up and down the side of the mountain early in the evening after it’s gotten dark and before they shut the tram down.
Now, this will give you an idea of how terrible I am at astronomy and how good Florian is. We moved here a couple of years ago, and I noticed this other bright light hanging in the sky over the tram station, but it was too high up to be on a tower or something, and it would move, slowly creeping along until it would go down behind the mountain.
I thought at first it was a UFO because I’d heard about them being all over the place out here in the desert, but this light was always in the same place every night at around the same time and it’d go off in the same direction, taking the same amount of time to descend. So obviously, it wasn’t a UFO.. it was some kind of weather balloon they had tethered to a really long line and they’d reel it in slowly every night to get the barometric pressure changes.
I was pretty sure that’s what it was, but I thought I’d ask Florian about it anyway.
“Oh, that? That’s the planet Venus.”
Man, he’s good.
So Florian became my go-to guy for all things astronomical, which meant that it was all that much more important I be out in the parking lot last Sunday night as the space shuttle Endeavor approached.
“It’ll be coming from the north,” he said. “It’ll be bright too, and moving fast.”
I took coffeesister with me and, as we stood out in the parking lot looking toward the north, it appeared right on schedule. It streaked across the sky, too slow to be a meteor and too fast to be an airplane, disappearing before it reached the horizon because the sun stopped reflecting off of it as it entered the earth’s shadow.
It was coupled with the international space station, although we couldn’t really tell since they were both so far away.
We saw them pass over the following night too, but the real show was on Tuesday evening.
They come around a whole bunch of times – about fifteen times a day, actually. But we’re in this little window every 24 hours here in the southern California desert where it’s dark enough to see them while at the same time, the sun is still reflecting on them because they haven’t entered the earth’s shadow yet.
Florian said that on Tuesday, the shuttle will be zooming along with the space station close behind it because they would have separated a few hours earlier, and then they’d both be followed by the Russian supply vessel that had been launched a few days ago, which would be lower, dimmer and about five minutes behind.
So out we went at 8:45 pm, and took up station in the vacant lot west of our apartment complex this time, because the whole thing was supposed to be over Mt. San Jacinto, where we usually have Venus but it’s the wrong time of year or something. The tram station light was there, as always, and above it came these two bright orbs, moving over the west, headed toward Mexico.
Florian had given me the URL to this tracking website earlier in the day, so I’d had it up before going out there. We’d been watching the shuttle’s progress as it moved over Argentina, where Governor Sanford was believed to have parachuted out of it before it continued on under Africa and around the back side. Just before we went out, I grabbed this screen shot..
I like the real-time statistics displayed on this site, especially the “Eccentricity” read-out. I’d install that on my profile but it’d go off the chart. The “Right Ascension of ascending node” is pretty darned helpful, as is the “Argument of perigee.” I hope Perigee wins because he has a good point.
If you know your geography, you can see southern California on this map (actually, if you don’t know your geography you can still see it, but you don’t know where it is – stay in school, kids.) The shuttle isn’t really all that close to us in this screen shot – it’s off the coast of Oregon. Yet we walked out there right after I grabbed this and there they were, the shuttle followed by the space station, zooming along over the California coast in a big hurry.
We cheered. A guy driving by in a pick-up truck gave us a weird look and I pointed to the sky, but he just shook his head and drove on. Does he care NOTHING about current events in space? Geez..
This time they stayed brightly lit until they vanished over the mountain to the south, which had something to do with the earth’s shadow plus the right ascension of the ascending node of 92.3583, which any moron knows is enough to be visible.
Coffeesister attempted a picture with her camera phone but I don’t think those things are designed to get night shots of passing space shuttles, so we’ll have to settle for this shot of the two vehicles together that was taken the night before by local resident (and oddly enough, Palm Springs Aerial Tram Operator) Ray Shobe..
photo by Ray Shobe
This will give you an idea of what I’m describing, except there’s no long tail when you see it live. Ray did a time-exposure to show how the thing clips along in a straight line, going right through palm trees and stuff.
So, maybe we didn’t get our own photo or video of it, but we still have the memory of seeing it and even though they were just two bright lights in the sky zooming along to the south, we knew what they were and that there were people on them and that we’d probably not get to see anything like this again anytime soon.
Unless they’re coming by again tonight.
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