The International Space Station will put in a pair of spectacular appearances over Hawaii in the days ahead, weather permitting.
At 6:14 a.m. Sunday the station will rise in the northwest and head nearly straight up. Between 6:15 and 6:16 a.m. the craft will pass between Jupiter, high in the southern sky, and the bright star Spica in the constellation Virgo.
All three objects are bright, with Jupiter shining at a magnitude of minus 2 and Spica at plus 0.9. The space station tops them both at an apparent magnitude of minus 3.4.
Also in the sky at that hour are a slender, waning crescent moon near the left claw of Scorpius, and below it, just above the southeastern horizon, Saturn and Mercury. The Southern Cross is just above the southern horizon.
Near the top of the sky is the bright star Arcturus, which the Hawaiians call Hokule‘a. The Hawaiian name for Spica is Hikianalia, also the name for a voyaging canoe that escorted the Hokule‘a on part of its current world circumnavigation.
At 7:23 p.m. Tuesday the station will rise in the southwest and head straight up. It will pass near the top of the sky between 7:26 and 7:27 p.m.
It will pass near the bright star Capella, high in the northeast, and then blink out of sight as it enters Earth’s shadow, on a line formed by the Gemini twins, Castor and Pollux.
Also in the sky are Venus and Mars, close together in the west-southwest, and the constellations Orion and Canis Major in the southeast.
The space station, 249 miles up and traveling at 17,150 mph, is visible shortly before dawn and after sunset when it is illuminated by the sun against the darker sky.
Currently aboard are American astronauts Robert Kimbrough and Peggy Whitson, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet and Russians Andrey Borisenko, Sergey Rzlukov and Oleg Novitskiy.
