Wow! Some things catch me way off balance . . .

. . . and that's good!

I don't get too excited about seeing satellites - in fact they can become a bit of a nuisance - but I found my jaw dropping a few moments ago as Bren and I stood on the upstairs deck and watched the International Space Station, followed by the Space Shuttle, cross high from northwest to southeast, ducking in and out of hight hin clouds.

It was 9:20 pm EDT and spaceweather.com had alerted me this morning that the opportunity was there to see the two tonight. I checked heavens-above.com, another favorite site, and got the predicted time, direction, and altitude. But then promptly forgot about it in part because it was mostly cloudy when I was out an hour ago and in part because I was writing a post about the moon illusion. But Bren came in and reminded me and when we went to the upstairs deck we saw a lot of high, fairly thick clouds. But Venus and Staurn were visible in the west, as well as a cloud-shrouded, six-day moon.

I looked overhead and saw I could make out Arcturus, so I figured we had a reasonable chance. Then Bren said she saw it - and sure enough, there was the space station, at least at magnitude 0. About 20 seconds later we spotted the shuttle tagging along behind it by roughly 10 degrees.

That number is from memory, I didn't try to measure. But as i say, there was something awesome here. Maybe simply knowing that these particular bright lights - the shuttle was obviously smaller and dimmer - had live people in them. And maybe it is simply that here our race may be doing something right - we're exploring and we're sharing that exploration with several countries, including Russia. That's neat.

But this wasn't really on my mind - it was just a deep feeling of awe. I couldn't tak emy eyes off them until they vanished at the tree line. Super cool!