Any one know exactly where the space lab is in the night sky. I've noticed somthing bright and always exactly in the same place to the south. Is that it ? Have I found it !?
heavens-above is the site you want. This post has direct links to the NYC pages if you don't want to hunt around.
You may be seening Venus, which is very bright in the southwest after sunset. If it's really always in the same place, it's a beacon. All celestial objects move, or appear to, as the earth moves. An object in earth orbit will move faster, because it's closer. I've seen satellites, and you can register their motion against that of the stars. I don't think the space station would be as bright as Venus, which is usually the brightest object we can see, other than the sun and moon.
I agree, you're probably right about Venus, but strictly speaking, not all orbiting objects move (in relation to the ground.) Theoretically it could be a geostationary satellite (one in a Clarke orbit at 35,786 kilometers above the earth) which would be in a fixed position overhead. (But maybe that has to be directly over the equator so it couldn't be so low in the sky?)
ur right I'm looking at about the same time every day (just after sunset) but it does seem to hold its same posssition every day at that time.
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- bill 12-14-2000 9:18 pm
heavens-above is the site you want. This post has direct links to the NYC pages if you don't want to hunt around.
- jim 12-15-2000 2:20 pm [add a comment]
You may be seening Venus, which is very bright in the southwest after sunset. If it's really always in the same place, it's a beacon. All celestial objects move, or appear to, as the earth moves. An object in earth orbit will move faster, because it's closer. I've seen satellites, and you can register their motion against that of the stars. I don't think the space station would be as bright as Venus, which is usually the brightest object we can see, other than the sun and moon.
- alex 12-15-2000 2:51 pm [add a comment]
I agree, you're probably right about Venus, but strictly speaking, not all orbiting objects move (in relation to the ground.) Theoretically it could be a geostationary satellite (one in a Clarke orbit at 35,786 kilometers above the earth) which would be in a fixed position overhead. (But maybe that has to be directly over the equator so it couldn't be so low in the sky?)
- jim 12-15-2000 6:21 pm [add a comment]
i was planning to and just did delete my # but your post went with it??, and whats the problem w/ my number, are those tantric godesses going to call me?? and whats google got to do with it??
- Skinny 12-15-2000 6:24 pm [add a comment]
It's not really a problem, especially if its tantric goddess who are calling you. I guess I'm just paranoid. What if some direct marketing company gets a hold of it? (You thought spam email was bad...) I've never heard of that happening, but I don't see many phone numbers on the web. The google part is just that they are constantly indexing (and keeping a copy) of many of our pages. So, theoretically at least, your cell phone number might be returned in a google search (and you probably don't want your number popping up in response to most of the search queries that lead people to our site.) But even this, I guess, might not be so bad. What do I know? Like I said, I'm just a little paranoid about the privacy thing (says the man who posts little bits of his life to a public weblog.) I'm sure it's fine.
- jim 12-15-2000 6:46 pm [add a comment]
[warning: long boring not very important post to follow] You deleted your comment and mine (which was a reply to yours) was deleted with it. That's funny. I think that's the first time this has come up. I never thought about this situation. I wonder if it's a problem? What happens is: all the comments are in a tree structure with the post itself as the top node. Under the top node their can be any number of second tier, or child, nodes (all the comments,) and then each of these second tier nodes can themselves have as many child nodes (comments on the first level of comments,) and so on and so on... But, if you delete any one node in the tree, all of the child nodes of that node (and children of those children, ect., all the way down the tree structure) are deleted as well. Hmmm.... Oh yes, now I'm remembering. The system didn't used to do this (it didn't actually go through and delete the children of a deleted comment,) but then we had a problem where if you deleted a parent node, the child nodes would still be there, but they wouldn't be visible. They'd be cast adrift in the database, as it were, and this was a big problem because if you hadn't read one of the cast away nodes, then it would keep showing up on the front page that you had an unread comment, but there would be no way to find the comment (you couldn't navigate down to it, becasue it would be no longer connected to the tree.) So I made it so the child comments are actually deleted (and not just cast adrift) when a node above is deleted. Maybe there should be some sort of warning when you go to delete a comment that has children. If you didn't want to delete the children you could just edit the comment (or post) and delete all the text (leaving a blank box) and then repost the now blank comment. Blah, blah, blah....
- jim 12-15-2000 7:19 pm [add a comment]
ur right I'm looking at about the same time every day (just after sunset) but it does seem to hold its same posssition every day at that time.
- bill 12-15-2000 6:55 pm [add a comment]