Joe has set up a star party for Satuday night. Some NCR members and the local NCAS are going to set up equipment Saturday. The big thing is... no moon! Dark skies!

Joe has set up a star party for Saturday night.

He asked me to do an encore presentation of the movies too on Saturday night. I think he must have special guests coming....

Doug

Actually, Chad Moore and John Wilke are doing the ogainizing. And the thought, hope is that folks that missed Friday Night at the Movies would benefit from the Saturday Night Encore.

I typically access the Heavens-Above.com web site and have the North site coordinates plugged in but the website only looks seven days ahead, as far as I can tell, so I won't have a Iridium Flare schedule, or ISS or any other significant looky doowahs until early next week for the Mayhem weekend. I think Atlantis will still be with the Hubble so that might also be something to see. Bruce is correct. Members from NCAS will be attending for a Star Party (groupies invited too) Saturday night for Dark Skies. Nebulas and star clusters and planets, oh my. Always worth staying up for, if only to see that much further out there than a nice pair of binocs will do on a dark night, out there, away from the light pollution of the front range. Sure hope we've got clear skies coming our way.

I see a predicted -2.0 ISS pass at 22:20 on the 23rd. It's still to early for the Iridium flare predictions.

I'm seeing a -8 Iridium Flare on the 23rd at 2134, 57° Altitude, 73° (ENE) Azimuth. You might have to use the Next link at the upper right corner to get to the page. Should be an excellent flare, given clear skies.

Indeed, there will be 14 flares + 8 passes of the ISS while we are out there. In addition to the -8 that Ken referred to, there is a -7 *early* Friday morning. Either one of those would be an absolute dandy. In fact, they'd be visible through some fairly meaningful cloud cover.

I printed the schedules and tucked them into my range box.

For those of you out there on Thursday night, there are two -4's, as follows:

--> 2118 / altitude of 15 degrees / azimuth 346 deg (NNW)

--> 2242 / altitude of 20 degrees / azimuth 45 deg (NE)

If it is clear Friday AM, it will be worthwhile to get up for this one, which is a -7!

--> 242 AM / altitude of 30 degrees / azimuth 290 deg (WNW)