she's
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I swear, if I knew about this ahead of time I would have given you all a heads-up. Of course, it'll keep going on for (hopefully) a long time, so you might be able to check it out for yourself.

Tonight my parents and I went out into the backyard to watch the International Space Station cross overhead.

I've been satellite hunting since I was a little kid with my first set of binoculars. On a clear evening, I would scan the sky with my binoculars, looking for a moving speck against the carpet of stars. When I would find an object that lacked blinking lights (which would make it an airplane), I would then check its direction and speed. If it was moving fairly fast in a generally north/south direction, there was a very good chance that I was seeing a satellite.

Over the years, when idly looking into the sky with friends, I've pointed out satellites. They were almost always fairly faint specks, and my friends would have dismissed them for airplanes, if they had noticed them at all... Until I pointed out that they were moving far too fast to be an airplane.

Of course, then they would ask me what sort of satellite it was, and I usually didn't have an answer. Spy satellite? Communications? Weather? I couldn't tell them.

Sometimes I would see space junk. Spend third stage rockets are jettisoned into orbit when a spacecraft doesn't need it anymore, and are sent tumbling around the earth. When I saw a faint light that would fade out... and back in... and back out... That was a spent rocket, tumbling end over end, catching the sunlight before turning end-on and becoming invisible.

The satellites are visible during the evening and early morning due to simple spatial relations. After dusk, although the sun has gone down, the sun still illuminates objects in orbit above your location. (Please refer to my incredibly amateur illustration.)

There is a website that predicts when the Space Station is visible wherever you are, and tonight was prime viewing for my area. At about 9pm, my parents and I went outside with our binoculars, scanning the sky for that speck of light.

It was getting hazy, and more clouds were moving in from the west. I was able to pick out constellations, only to have the vanish minutes later. I was afraid that we were going to be clouded out, but decided to stay until the appointed time anyway.

At 9:14pm, I announced the time and stepped up my scanning. If we were going to see it, the time was now. I took a step backwards and lowered my binoculars to make sure I wasn't going to trip over the garden hose.

In the absence of the narrow field of view that the binoculars provided, I saw a bright light moving across the sky, northwest to southeast. I alerted my parents, who were also held captive by the restricted view of their binoculars.

It was very bright. Was it an airplane? It was moving too fast. There were no lights. It was moving. In the space of thirty seconds, the light had moved across the area of sky that we could see from our yard. We ran into the neighbor's yard so that we could see farther to the southeast, and watched as the light faded from sight.

One of the reasons that I like looking for satellites is that it gives me a thrill. It's something that not everyone would notice. It's like seeing a secret.