Start off the new year right by nerding out and impressing your friends today at 6:03 p.m., when the International Space Station will be visible over South Florida for about six minutes.
Yes, the station is visible to the naked eye as it cruises 200 miles above the Earth. NASA says it's the brightest object in the sky after the sun and moon, and it has been described as looking like a star (at night) or like a fast-moving plane (in the day).
NASA has a cool service called Spot the Station, which lets you enter your location and receive text messages when there are viewing opportunities where you live. That might be once or twice a week to once or twice a month, the agency says.
It's also fun to follow the astronauts on Twitter. Why, just today Commander Chris Hadfield sent out images of his bathroom (Yep, they read Shit My Dad Says when stuck on the pot) and his crib (he calls it a "sleeping pod" and says it doubles as a recording studio).
Currently, there are six men -- three Russians, two Americans, and a Canadian -- onboard the Space Station for Expedition 34. Their experiments include studying how surfactants are affected in microgravity and also demonstrating a cytometer, which lets doctors count the molecules and cells in blood.
Don't you wish you had majored in astrophysics now?
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