Whatever your thoughts on the value of, and / or correctness of building the International Space Station, you have to admit this is awesome! This image was taken by the most recent Space Shuttle mission, STS-119, and is perhaps the most beautiful image I have ever seen of the station.
I'm not very old, and so have practically grown up with the ISS. It wasn't too long after I became a total space nut as a kid that I had the memorable experience of watching the orbiter Atlantis dock with the Russian space station Mir live on TV. That night, I watched the combined craft zoom through the sky over my house. Watching this thing brighter than Jupiter fly over was my first satellite observation, and one of the many events which led to my becoming an amateur astronomer later in life.
I was fascinated when I heard about the plans to build the ISS, though I doubted it would ever be finished. I saw some of the modules in prelaunch processing behind glass at the Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama during my trip to Space Academy. I followed with interest the first construction flights, and watched some of the spacewalks it took to put the pieces together. Mission by mission, piece by piece, it was built. From this picture, you can see we're almost done. The ISS is longer than a football field, and now reaches magnitude -6 in the sky, the brightest object besides the moon in Earth's night time. Wow.
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