Discussion: Crew Dragon and ISS passes over the northeast tonight

Some great overpasses for Boston and New England tonight. Both vehicles will pass almost directly overhead in Boston around 9:45 PM tonight. They just performed a boost burn, so dragon's orbit will have changed a bit. I'll try to update again later this evening. The ISS orbit won't change, so the tracks and charts here are correct. ISS will be super bright - should knock your socks off. They are predicting mag 0 for Dragon, which I think is overly optimistic, but it should still be bright enough to see.

Dragon will be leading the ISS by about 5 mins. Look for Dragon starting at 9:45. I've posted the heavens-above charts here because the website has been intermittent this afternoon. But you should check the direct links later in the evening as they update the orbit.

Ground tracks. Dragon leads in green, ISS 5 mins later in red:


crew dragon sky chart for this pass
ISS sky chart for this pass

Direct links for the Boston pass predicts:
Crew Dragon
ISS

Oh rubbish, just saw this now! That would have been fun.

Aww, rats! I saw it from here. Dragon is *trailing* the ISS by a few seconds. I was scrambling to get some orbit updates before the passes but there were none. The one with a more recent epoch from celestrak was garbage. Even the heavens-above live tracking seemed off. The ISS pass predict remained accurate though. The SpaceX live stream (which will run continuously through the rendezvous tomorrow) shows the ground tracks periodically, and the Dragon and ISS icons are right on top of each other.

Here's a quick stack of two 20s exposures. Dragon was about 30s behind the ISS.

ISS was visible from near the horizon, but Dragon wasn't visible until halfway though the pass. You can see it brightening from left to right in the image here.