I trotted down to the Capitol Reflecting Pool at 9:30pm last night to catch the space station flyby. Unfortunately, a mischievous cumulus cloud happened to obscure Jupiter at the moment of closest contact, but the station came zooming out from behind the cloud, a brilliant point of light crossing from southwest to northeast in the span of about a minute.

At the same time, I was on my cellphone with Amy as she watched the same scene from atop her roof in Baltimore, 40 miles north. At the point that the station, low in the horizon, was on a horizontal level with Sirius, she reported that it was a few degrees above, and that it reached the level of Sirius only seconds later. Parallax in action.

On Spaceweather, someone has a GIF animation of the station passing by Jupiter. Good thing they didn’t collide. ;)