by Joe Stieber » Fri Jun 05, 2020 7:26 am
What the picture and the text don't tell us is that the Crew Dragon was a couple of minutes behind the ISS. At the time, they weren't traveling alongside each other as one might gather from the picture alone.
I actually saw these same two passes shortly before 10 pm EDT (UT-4) on May 30, 2020, from a site in Moorestown, NJ, about 75 miles southwest of Central Park. Of course visually, the ISS was a bright dot moving left-to-right while the Crew Dragon was a less-bright dot (about 2nd magnitude, roughly like Polaris) trailing it. Because of parallax, the paths I saw passed much closer to Vega, which is visible in the picture along with the other brighter stars of Lyra, to the right of the inset, in the gap between the upper sets of cloud streaks.
What the picture and the text don't tell us is that the Crew Dragon was a couple of minutes behind the ISS. [i]At the time, they weren't traveling alongside each other as one might gather from the picture alone[/i].
I actually saw these same two passes shortly before 10 pm EDT (UT-4) on May 30, 2020, from a site in Moorestown, NJ, about 75 miles southwest of Central Park. Of course visually, the ISS was a bright dot moving left-to-right while the Crew Dragon was a less-bright dot (about 2nd magnitude, roughly like Polaris) trailing it. Because of parallax, the paths I saw passed much closer to Vega, which is visible in the picture along with the other brighter stars of Lyra, to the right of the inset, in the gap between the upper sets of cloud streaks.