I headed out Tuesday evening to watch the space shuttle and International Space Station pass overhead. Both of them appeared on schedule and I was able to capture them in some long exposure photos.
About a minute before the ISS disappeared from view I grabbed my Canon SD850IS and captured a short video of the pass. I’m quite happy with the results and have posted the video to YouTube. It’s probably best viewed in full screen mode.
I’ve crunched some more precise numbers for this evening’s ISS and STS-133 passes. The times are in UTC, so you need to subtract 5 hours for Eastern Standard time. (Click here to download them in a text file.)
Ottawa-To-ISS Time (UTCG) Azimuth (deg) Elevation (deg) Range (km) ----------------------- ------------- --------------- ----------- 9 Mar 2011 00:20:38.123 292 0 2159.492211 9 Mar 2011 00:21:38.000 287 4 1765.477591 9 Mar 2011 00:22:38.000 280 9 1389.558028 9 Mar 2011 00:23:38.000 267 15 1055.451478 9 Mar 2011 00:24:38.000 244 22 818.373598 9 Mar 2011 00:25:38.000 209 24 774.603489 9 Mar 2011 00:26:38.000 180 18 951.326850 9 Mar 2011 00:27:38.000 164 11 1258.305207 9 Mar 2011 00:28:38.000 156 6 1622.294953 9 Mar 2011 00:29:38.000 150 1 2011.420073 9 Mar 2011 00:29:58.922 149 0 2150.274764
Ottawa-To-STS-133 Time (UTCG) Azimuth (deg) Elevation (deg) Range (km) ----------------------- ------------- --------------- ----------- 9 Mar 2011 00:20:05.553 292 0 2159.008371 9 Mar 2011 00:21:05.000 287 4 1767.294751 9 Mar 2011 00:22:05.000 280 9 1390.441394 9 Mar 2011 00:23:05.000 268 15 1054.707599 9 Mar 2011 00:24:05.000 244 23 814.906252 9 Mar 2011 00:25:05.000 209 24 768.231806 9 Mar 2011 00:26:05.000 180 18 943.899552 9 Mar 2011 00:27:05.000 164 11 1250.970718 9 Mar 2011 00:28:05.000 155 6 1615.247805 9 Mar 2011 00:29:05.000 150 1 2004.620053 9 Mar 2011 00:29:27.464 149 0 2153.829615
The International Space Station and the Space Shuttle Discovery will be passing over Ottawa the next couple of days and, weather-permitting, there should be a couple of opportunities to see them as they pass overhead.
You won’t need any fancy equipment to view them. They’ll look like a pair of bright dots, one chasing the other across the sky. According to the Heavens Above website, there are three passes between now and Thursday evening that should be visible from Ottawa.
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The author of the YOURLS WordPress to Twitter Plugin has released an update. Presumably, version 1.4.9 will address the brokenness I wrote about a couple of days ago that happened when WordPress 3.1 was released.
If you implemented the solution I wrote about, you should probably upgrade to version 1.4.9.
The recent dump of snow reminded me of a story CBC ran last Friday talking about how some cyclists that ride in the winter have been complaining that there are snowbanks in some bike lanes. This is causing them to have to move into the lanes with the rest of the traffic, which is probably deterring some cyclists. I’m not sure this is a Bad Thing.
The radar was very colourful…
The roads were slippery and snow covered…
Aren’t you jealous you missed all this because you were asleep?
I upgraded to WordPress 3.1 at the end of February. Usually, there’s very little breakage, but this time the YOURLS WordPress to Twitter plugin (version 1.4.8) I’ve been using to automatically post a tweet with a shortlink using my dew.is short URL service broke, which was very annoying. I was able to turn turn on the Tweetly Updater plugin as a stop-gap measure, but it uses bit.ly and I really wanted to use my own dew.is.
Browsing through the comments on the author’s website, I came across one from someone else who had managed to track down what appears to be the offending code, so I thought I’d try it out.
AKA Keeper of Maps, I'm a geocacher who lives in Ottawa, Canada.
