International Space Station now incredibly bright (magnitude now reaches -5 to -6)

Here's my amateur attempt to imagine what the ISS would look like in the sky compared to the Moon and Venus. No making fun!

Spaceweather.com has a number of links from astronomers that have been observing the ISS now that the new solar panels are unfurled, and apparently it's now incredibly bright. If you remember what Venus was like about a month ago, then take that and imagine it four times brighter. That's bright.

These numbers mean the ISS was four times brighter than Venus and more than 60 times brighter than Sirius, the brightest star in the sky.

I wish spaceweather.com would change its page formatting a bit so that each entry could have its own url. Would make it a lot easier to link to exact posts.

Anyway, here are some of the links it gives from individual astronomers that have been observing the ISS. I'm sure there will be a lot more over the next few hours or days so make sure to check back there every once in a while to see what they have.

more images: from Pawel Warchal of Cracow, Poland; from RalfVandebergh of the Netherlands; from Janusz Krysiak of Koluszki, Poland; from Martin Wagner of Sonnenbuehl, Germany; from Rob Carew of Melbourne Australia;

more movies: from Dirk Ewers of Germany (DivX required); from Dave Gallant of Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada; from Mike Tyrrell of Northwich, Cheshire, UK;

If you want to know when you'll be able to see the ISS where you live, see here. I've got two flybys where I live (Seoul) on the 30th and 31st of March.

Edit: I just noticed that the last video there is from YouTube so I can embed it here. Here it is: