With beautiful weather today, a scheduled launch of a supply rocket to the International Space Station is expected to go off without a hitch at 8:31 PM on Tuesday night.
The Cygnus cargo spacecraft, loaded with more than 8,200 pounds of research, crew supplies and hardware, will launch aboard an Antares rocket developed by Northrop Grumman from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. It should provide a spectacular spectacle for all within eye view – including most of New Jersey.
If you’re in the Lakewood area, you can expect to see the rocket rising in the southeastern sky about 90 to 120 seconds after launch.
Now, if you’re really interested in seeing a rocket launch up close and personal, you can drive down to the NASA Wallops Flight Facility, which is a little more than a 4 hour journey from Lakewood. The place to go to is NASA Wallops Flight Facility Visitor Center at Route 175, 175 Chincoteague Road Building J-20, Wallops Island, VA 23337. The visitor center will be open from 5:30 pm to 9 pm.
It gets better. Not only should you be able to see a rocket launch tonight, but you can also see a supermoon – in which a full moon appears larger in the sky than usual – in tonight’s sky. And later this month, you’ll be able to see a blue moon, like in the expression “once in a blue moon.” While it sounds extraordinarily cool, a blue moon is just the name given to a supermoon that is the second one to appear in the night sky in a single month.
