I was sitting out on the front porch last Wednesday night working on a hip-hop version of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” to amuse my grandchildren with, when a weird outer-space noise came squawking through my phone.

It was my SkyGuide astronomy app alerting me that the International Space Station was about to pass overhead.

I’ve tried to catch a glimpse of it several times before, but it was always too cloudy or there were too many trees in the way.

But this time, it was coming in from the northwest, crossing the Pacific coast of Canada and

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