The International Space Station (ISS) has an operational amateur radio station and repeater on board.   This amateur station is given the designator of ARISS for Amateur Radio International Space Station.  Those of you with scanners may have heard the many ham repeaters in your local area.  You can tune into the ham repeater on board ISS by setting your scanner to 145.800MHz.  You will need a modest outside antenna to hear ISS but you most likely have that on your scanner anyway. 

Each ISS mission always has one or more ham radio operators on board.

To learn more about ISS ham radio activities go to: http://www.amsat.org/amsat-new/ariss/

To learn more about becoming a ham radio operator so you can talk to the crew of ISS go to:

http://www.arrl.org/

 You can determine if ISS will be flying over your area by going to the ISS flyby alert link and following directions.

Good listening!

This June we will travel to Greeley Colorado for our monthly state meeting. We will be one week early due to schedules so check our calendar and mark the date, time and location.

FLYBY ALERT: The International Space Station (ISS) is just beginning a 4-week series of bright flybys over Europe and North America. In early May, the ISS joins Jupiter and the stars of the Summer Triangle in a glittering pre-dawn sky. Later in the month, flybys shift to evening hours and the ISS will cross paths with Saturn, the Moon and Mars.

Below is the link to the Flyby tool so you can enter your Zip and find out when ISS will be over your neighborhood.

ISS flyby alert link

VATICAN CITY  —  The Vatican’s chief astronomer says that believing in aliens does not contradict faith in God.

The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, says that the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.

In an interview published Tuesday by Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Funes says that such a notion “doesn’t contradict our faith” because aliens would still be God’s creatures.

The interview was headlined “The extraterrestrial is my brother.”

Funes said that ruling out the existence of aliens would be like “putting limits” on God’s creative freedom.

• Click here to visit FOXNews.com’s Space Center.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,355400,00.html

May 6, 2008: At 11:18 AM on the cloudless morning of Thursday, September 1, 1859, 33-year-old Richard Carrington—widely acknowledged to be one of England’s foremost solar astronomers—was in his well-appointed private observatory. Just as usual on every sunny day, his telescope was projecting an 11-inch-wide image of the sun on a screen, and Carrington skillfully drew the sunspots he saw.

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