Sunday, 24 February 2013

Indulge your inner geek

Back before my iPhone tragically fell in a river I had this cool little app called Skyview. You might have to dish out a buck or two to get it, but it is worth it. One thing I think everybody should try is to track the International Space Station and watch it pass over on a clear night. When you find the station it might be directly on the other side of Earth, but it takes surprisingly little time to come around, though I guess it is going 7.71 kilometers per second. There's no mistaking it when it passes over; it move too fast to be a plane, and it doesn't blink. It looks more like a star.

On the subject of fast things, the fastest outbound spacecraft is the Voyager I, which is now leaving the solar system at a speed of 17 km/s. The fastest man-made objects on record are the Helios probes, reaching 70 km/s on their closest approach to the Sun.

At the very least, useful information to have for trivia night.

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