My friend Jerry mentioned today that he had seen the International Space Station pass overhead last night. That piqued my curiosity, so I decided to look up on NASA’s site to see if it was passing overhead again tonight. It was, at 10:20 pm and 11:56 pm.

The sky was simply too bright to get a decent picture at 10:20pm, so we decided to meet up again at 11:30ish. This time it came in at a different angle, passing right over the top of the Capitol building. I had the shutter set to stay open for 30 seconds, so you get to see the streak. Obviously this station travels very quickly; it passed quite a long ways in those 30 seconds. That allowed us a window of 2-5 minutes to see it if we’d been able to see both horizons, but really only a matter of seconds from the wooded Capitol grounds.

I did “push” the exposure a little bit to help get the streak to show through better. The lights of the Capitol were blinding and they shut off right after the ISS slipped out of sight at midnight.