Indigo_Sunrise wrote:moconnor wrote:I am always disappointed when I hear about these things on the news AFTER they've happened. Is there a website that I can visit that would alert me to upcoming cool spaces happenings, such as this one?
You could also keep an eye on the Wallops web site:
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/wallops/home/index.html
I live in the southern New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia and have seen a number of launches out of Wallops, often travelling to East Point as we did for this launch, to get a better view (it's closer to Wallops and has a sea horizon, but in particular for the ATREX mission, dark skies). Interestingly, East Point now has two APODs this year; the other was on January 8th:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120108.html
In the early summer of 2012, they're scheduled to launch an Antares rocket from Wallops. This is not a small sounding rocket, but a fairly big rocket that will ultimately be delivering the Cygnus supply module to the ISS:
http://www.orbital.com/Antares/ Should be interesting!
On the day of the launch, we keep an eye on the Wallops Launch Webcast for the latest updates (the countdown, delays and/or scrubs):
http://sites.wff.nasa.gov/webcast/
There's also a telephone hotline listed on the main site which provides recoreded updates through the countdown. At East Point on Tueday morning, Jerry was using a smartphone to check the webcast page while Ray and I were periodically checking the hotline on our cell phones. Our hearts sank at 4 am EDT when they announced a hold due to a boat in the security zone, but we hung in (the launch on the previous Friday morning was scrubbed due to an errant boat).
Finally, launching commenced at 4:58 am, a mere 2 minutes before the end of the morning's window. After three hours of waiting in the cold and wind, the ascending rockets themselves were somewhat disappointing. However, when the clouds started to appear about 10 minutes later, it was simply awesome and incredible. Far more spectacular than we had expected. It was worth the trips and the wait -- probably one of my more memorable nights watching the sky.
P.S. -- the three-hour wait wasn't a waste of time; I brought my scope along.
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/icon_smile.gif)