ISS

I just saw the International Space Station fly right over our house!!

My neighbour (bless her) text me about an hour before it was scheduled to go over, saying she'd heard on the news that it would be visible at 10:24pm.

So at 10:10 I headed outside onto our decking with a glass of wine to sit and wait. It's gone off chilly at night here but still warm enough to be outside in shorts and t-shirt for half an hour.

It was so nice to sit outside in the dark and look at the stars whilst listening to the night life (my word that cicadas are noisy!), watching fireflies and enjoying a bit of quiet time with a glass of wine.

Jeremy is working away (in Australia) so the days have been a bit crazy and the evenings, getting the kids to bed, seem to last forever (Ok that is a slight exaggeration but I do seem to run out of patience around 8pm!) so it was nice to go outside for a few minutes and chill out.

At 10:25 I met my neighbours out in the court and we watched for it coming. Suddenly we spotted something moving slowly above the Church which is WNW from our house. It was moving in the right direction and as it got closer it got faster. It took about two minutes to cross over the house and disappear out of sight. It was there one second and then seemed to fly into a cloud. My neighbour Dan informed me that it was because it lost the sun's rays with the curvature of the earth. Thank goodness he was there because Jen and I were just giggling away all excited to have seen it!

It looked exactly like a child would draw a star - a bright white five pointed thing moving in the sky!

It was overhead at around 8:30 but it was too light to see it. Can you believe it only takes 2 hours to orbit the earth?! I wonder who was on it and what they were doing during those 2 minutes that we could see it.

It's supposed to be visible again tomorrow night so I am off to dig out our binoculars!

Update:
The binoculars didn't work - it made the image jump around in a weird way! But I have seen it 3 times now and took Charlotte out tonight. She was very pleased to see the space ship and waved to them. The website said we'd be able to see it at 8:40 but I was dubious as it was still light (though we could see the moon and bats were out eating the mosquitos) so when we spotted it heading east we were very excited! The only bright light in the sky! It has changed course from the 1st night and I believe we might only see it for another couple of nights. It has been fun to head out front with the neighbours and look up to see it. Living in Manchester, the sky was always too polluted or cloudy to see anything like this so I am a little bit chuffed!