David Kománek

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An ISS and Space Shuttle at the same time with naked eye ?

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It was a great moment for me. On Monday, March 7th, 2011 at about 18:50-18:55(CET = GMT+1) I was walking in Zelenec (near Prague, Czech Republic) from the train station to the gym to meet my second son and to go home with him. By walking along the street I noticed a very nice picture on the black sky (of course with much light pollution, but the air is very clean these chilly days and weather is great for stargazing).

The Moon was about two days old and in the west the thin Moon´s sickle was laid nearly horizontally, with very good visible earth-shine at the rest of Moon´s disc above it.

Bellow the moon I saw Jupiter near to the horizon.

Very close to the Moon I suddenly noticed a bright dot moving from the west to the south going through the southern part of Orion and north of Sirius, later to the eastern part of the sky (with culmination at about 30-40° of altitude). With regard to my earlier observations it could have been an International Space Station (ISS), which I later in night confirmed with the help of the internet
(http://www.heavens-above.com/PassDetails.asp?SatID=25544&lat=50.083&lng=14.467&alt=0&loc=Praha&TZ=CET&Date=40609.7445213741)
and using Stellarium software (http://www.stellarium.org).

The most exciting thing was that it was not the only moving object I witnessed. There were two bright points going the same trajectory, in my guess cca 5° apart.
According to SpaceFlight.com (http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts133/status.html)
and NASA (http://www.nasa.gov/directorates/somd/reports/iss_reports/index.html)
websites, the undocking of Discovery space shuttle happened today, two days before landing. So I think that the second object could be this space shuttle (STS-133) not very long after decoupling from an ISS, before the de-orbiting manoeuvres. If so, it was in the final part of the last flight of this shuttle and there will be only two more missions of its "brothers" so the chance to see it again is very small.

The question which remains: was it really space shuttle what I saw and if so, was the shuttle in front of or behind the space station on its orbital trajectory ? I guess the space shuttle was behind (westward) Cool

 sky map for STS-133



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