Seeing The Space Station

I just watched the International Space Station (ISS) fly over my house. At 5:07 AM, it rose out of the northwestern sky, sunlight reflecting off its solar panels, becoming higher and brighter by the second, and flew seemingly directly over my house. I watched it become fainter as it sank lower into the southeastern sky. It was visible for about 6 minutes. It wasn't the first time that I had seen the ISS.

The last time I saw it, I was living in Roanoke. I had left my apartment and was walking to my car and just happened to look up. Like just now, the ISS was high in the sky. Unlike just now, there were two points of light traversing the sky, one following the other. The trailing point of light was sunlight reflecting off the Space Shuttle, which was in the process of docking with the ISS. Or maybe it was undocking. I watched them until the earth eclipsed their sun and they suddenly switched off; first the ISS blinked out, then the shuttle blinked out.

I didn't get up early to see the ISS fly over. Rather, I haven't gone to bed tonight. Or, I didn't go to bed last night. Is tonight already last night at 5:30 AM? Yeah, tonight is in the future over 12 hours away.

It's strange to see the Space Station go overhead. Moving so fast, so quietly. Knowing there are people up there riding on that point of light in the sky. Knowing that in about 90 minutes they'll be up there again in the very same spot - relative to planet Earth, that is. I certainly won't be in the same spot to see them again. Earth's rotation is carrying me eastward at 1000 miles per hour. When the shuttle is again directly above the spot I was in at 5:07, I'll be about 1500 miles to the east.

The ISS is not a spectacle, but it's definitely worth seeing.

RxReminder

I'm almost finished with RxReminder. The setup program used to install a registry key so that RxReminder would start when Windows starts. However, that turned out to have a serious flaw; the application wouldn't work properly until it was closed and restarted. So now I have the setup program place a shortcut to the application into the common startup folder.

I also upgraded the program icon. The old icon looked like this:



That design has evolved and now it looks like this:

The to-do list is getting short. The main thing I have to do now is add error-handling code in critical spots.

Stay tuned.