In Search of -- International Space Station

It was really a bad day today because of clouds in sky and I lost a very good sighting opportunity of ISS. Last week I planned to track ISS in the sky but there was no sighting opportunity from Bangalore that week.

According to NASA’s HUMANSPACEFLIGHT (Tracker for sighting opportunities of ISS) today was the best day for getting glimpse of International Space Station. Can you realize that??

Satellite	Local(Date/Time)	Duration(Min)	MAX Elev(Deg)	Approach (Deg-Dir)	Departure (Deg-Dir)
ISS	Sun Jul 05/07:29 PM	1	12	10 above SSE	12 above SE
ISS	Mon Jul 06/07:52 PM	5	87	12 above SW	11 above NE
ISS	Tue Jul 07/05:36 AM	1	16	11 above N	16 above NNE
ISS	Tue Jul 07/08:20 PM	<1	11	11 above NNW	10 above NNW
ISS	Thu Jul 09/04:50 AM	4	21	11 above N	10 above ESE
ISS	Thu Jul 09/07:34 PM	<1	10	10 above NNW	10 above NNW
ISS	Fri Jul 10/05:14 AM	5	46	11 above NW	10 above SSE
ISS	Sat Jul 11/04:07 AM	2	23	23 above ENE	10 above ESE

So I again made a plan with my colleague Sai Tirumal, to watch the greatest engineering architecture made by Human being. According to above chart ISS was supposed to appear by 7:52 PM IST. So in the evening around 5:30pm we went outside and searched for a viewpoint. It was an open area in my office campus from where we were able to see almost 70% of the sky. At that time there were no clouds and we wish for the same at 7:52pm.

I corrected the time of my wristwatch and then started working with full efficiency to complete my pending office work for the day. At 7:40pm we went outside ( so early ..!!) Yeah I was not willing to loose any chance. When we stepped down to ground floor….

Oooppss…!!! I already had strong intution of bad weather conditions. The sky was full of clouds. Still we had some hope because there were some free areas from where we were able to see the sky. So we decided to try our luck. The moment came(7:52 pm) and suddenly the time started moving very fast. Yes most of the time we were trying to find some holes in clouds. CrrraaazzzYYYY….

It happens, there are many opportunities still pending and I will definitely try my Luck for the upcoming sightings..

--Cheers