International Space Station to be visible across Irish skies for 12 nights

Undated handout photo issued by Nasa of the International Space Station.

A spectacular sight of the International Space Station (ISS) will be visible across Irish skies for the next twelve nights. 

The €100bn ISS, which has six astronauts on board, orbits the Earth over 90 minutes. This means it goes around the Earth 16 times a day. 

It looks like an extremely bright star that takes a couple of minutes to cross the sky and will be visible until December 5. 

David Moore of Astronomy Ireland said it will be visible to the naked eye and is "extremely easy to see, even from the centre of brightly lit cities." 

"It is an incredible sight to see the International Space Station blazing across Irish skies so we are urging everyone in Ireland to go out and watch this amazing spectacle," he said. 

"It's 10 to 100 times brighter than the brightest star in the sky so it is plainly, indeed spectacularly, visible to the naked eye," Mr Moore added. 

The ISS is a huge laboratory in space that carries out experiments that can only done in weightlessness which for example includes developing new drugs and exotic high-technology materials. 

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