It's a bird, it's a plane, it's... an ISS and an Iridium flare!

V, her friend Caleb (of kitten fame) and I just got back from the roof of V and Kristy's high-rise apartment building, where we watched an International Space Station flyover and a magnitude -8 Iridium flare (the brightest possible) within a half-hour of one another. I figure, what better way to celebrate passing the bar than by watching nerdy astronomical phenomena? :)

Here's a shot of the ISS passing Albali:

The squiggly part of the line is a result of the wind rattling the camera early in the 15-second exposure. Full-size version here.

Here's an even squigglier image:

And here's a shot of a blurry V watching the ISS:

As for the Iridium flare, I messed up the timing of my photo and just barely caught the tail end of it:

It was the brightest I've seen, though. Very cool.

Tomorrow night, we have an amazing opportunity to see the magnitude -1.8 Space Station and a magnitude -8 Iridium flare almost intersect in the sky. We'll have to drive a bit east of here, but it'll totally be worth it. Here's a sky map I mashed up, showing the approximate location of the Iridium flare (in red) and the ISS (in blue) during a 15-second window from 7:52:48 PM to 7:53:03 PM:

But that's tomorrow night. For now, I'm off to celebrate my bar passage in a more traditional way... involving, well, a bar. :)