When the station starts to fade, it can turn – especially in binoculars – a dark ruddy colour, and looks like a fading ember in the darkness of the night…) ( Colours? Yes those highly reflective solar panels are made of a shiny gold material, and they give the ISS a golden hue as it crosses the sky. If you have a pair of binoculars though, you should definitely try training them on the ISS – they will make it look much bigger and brighter, and enhance its colours too. NONE! The best thing about ISS-spotting is that you don’t need a telescope – in fact a telescope is pretty useless for ISS-spotting because the ISS moves so quickly it’s very hard to keep it in a telescope’s high magnification eyepiece. All you need to know is what time to start looking for it. In recent years, the ISS has grown larger and brighter, and is now frequently so bright that you don’t need to be an astronomer – with a deep knowledge of the night sky and expensive equipment – to enjoy following it as it flies through the sky. That’s what makes it (and other satellites) visible to us in our night sky. That sunlight reflects off its enormous solar panel “wings”, just like sunlight glints off an airplane, or a mirror. Well, because it’s so high the ISS is still bathed in sunlight long after darkness has fallen down here on the ground. But how come we can see something so far away, so high above the Earth? If they go outside they put on a spacesuit. As they’re pressurised, like the inside of an airliner, the astronauts don’t need to wear spacesuits, they just wear normal clothing. These are the rooms and laboratories the astronauts live and work in. Between the solar array “wings” are lots of tubes or cylinders, all joined together, called “modules”.

The most obvious parts are the huge “wings” on either side are its solar arrays – these power the space station by collecting energy from the Sun. The ISS is made of many different parts, and has bits sticking out of it everywhere. That’s because a) we can’t afford to build one of those, and b) in real life, spacecraft don’t need to be pretty, they just have to work.

If you look at photos of the ISS you’ll see it looks nothing like the graceful, wheel-shaped space stations seen in science fiction films like “2001 A Space Odyssey”. Its pieces were all joined together in space, making it Mankind’s most ambitious, complicated and risky construction project ever. To look at it, you’d think it was a huge Meccano model, and in a way it is – a multi-billion dollar model built over many years, by different countries. The ISS is a high tech laboratory, orbiting the Earth at around 17,000 mph at almost 300 miles up in space, where astronauts live, work and do experiments. If you’re one of the many people who want to start doing this, but don’t know how or when to see the space station in the sky, this simple SPA Guide is for you. For many, it’s become as enjoyable a part of the hobby as watching a meteor shower or just standing outside under the stars on a clear night. Amateur astronomers have been enjoying watching the International Space Station drifting across the sky for years now.

International space station flyover