The Space Station is growing bigger and brighter with each mission by the Discovery. When the Discovery is docked or nearby there are spectacular opportunities to see them as they orbit the Earth.
The folks at Satellite FlyBys have been kind enough to set up a web page where you can find out when and where to look. The table below shows the appearances over the next few days in Wellington — all very conveniently at reasonable times in the morning.
| Date | Satellite | Rise time | Direction to look | Transit time | Max elevation | Magnitude |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 06/12 | ISS-Discovery | 07:07:42 am | S | 07:09:49 | 29.1 | -1.2 |
| 06/13 | ISS-Discovery | 07:29:05 am | WSW | 07:31:30 | 77.8 | -2.9 |
| 06/14 | ISS-Discovery | 07:50:31 am | W | 07:52:38 | 30.6 | -1.3 |
| 06/15 | ISS-Discovery | 06:40:41 am | ENE | 06:43:06 | 35.7 | -1.7 |
| 06/16 | ISS-Discovery | 07:02:17 am | N | 07:04:27 | 29.1 | -1.2 |
[Via : Simple Satellite Tracking from Spaceweather.com.]
I didn’t blog about this when the form first opened up for use by those outside North America, because it was unusable for people in New Zealand.
I don’t know whether my polite email to them about the problems was received as I never received a response, but after a day or two the form was changed so it worked for those of us here.
The initial problem was that the form required us to enter a State. We don’t have States, so there was a barrier right there. Sure we have some larger geographical districts — for example, the city of Wellington is in the Wellington region, while the city of Christchurch is in Canterbury.
But, you know, we’re a small country. We could still find Christchurch, or Oamaru, or Paeroa (population 4,000), even without a province, district or region.
Well, it wasn’t too bad, because the form offered us some ‘States’ to choose from. Except that the names included bizarre choices that after 45 years of living in New Zealand I’d never heard of, such as Clifton, Eyre and Kiwitea. There was absolutely nothing that would allow me to choose something ‘containing’ Wellington, which is, after all, our Capital City.
And although there’s a selector for City, I couldn’t use it until I’d successfully selected the State that supposedly contained that city. Sigh.
The form has now been fixed. Once you choose New Zealand it allows you to select New Zealand (general) as the State, and then you can choose from what seems like hundreds of ‘cities’, a list that does indeed include Wellington.
The lesson: if you make forms for international use that include any kind of geographical, or address, data, either make fields optional, or get a local to advise you on what you can reasonably require.
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