Lou found a website that lists when you can see satellites flying overhead (see http://www.nightskies.net/satellites/chooser.html). Last week I wrote about our first attempt to spot one. This week, instead of driving to Palos Verdes we drove to the sea-wall near the pier in Redondo Beach and found a place to sit. I was pretty skeptical that we’d be able to see it because there is a lot of light in the area and it was mostly cloudy. The moon would occasionally peak out from behind the clouds, but for the most part, we could only see the local lights reflected back at us from the clouds.
And it was cold.
We sat for about 10 minutes, till the appointed time, watching the moon fade in and out, occasionally glimpsing a star or two in the gaps between clouds and the occasional blinking airplane, when Lou spotted it.
It looked like a bright star but it was moving very quickly towards the south. It was straight west of us, about 45 degrees up, in a cloud gap. We watched it for about 30 seconds before it went behind another group of clouds. And that was it.
How cool is that?
As a side note, below is a Google image of the area we were sitting in. I put a little white circle where we were sitting (see the image below) just south of the marina. To our west is a channel, about 100 yards wide, protected on the far end by a break made from large boulders. Sitting along the wall, we heard a constant braying from seals who were sitting on the boulders. Because it was dark, we couldn’t see them, but we could see a small number of people climbing on the sea wall with flashlights. I wonder how close to the seals they can get?
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