Time was, if you washed up on a desert island and wanted to predict celestial events to avoid being turned into stew, you had to judge things just right so your preferred island happened to lie in the path of a suitable eclipse. Thanks to advances in technology, you can now predict much more frequent and widely-visible, albeit less spectacular, heavenly events. Like visible ISS passes, for example.

I took this photo from the bit of grass opposite my house in northern England, July 2010. It’s a one-minute exposure, and yes, that streak of light has people in it.