Sometimes it just all works!
For Melbourne was predicted a -2.5 magnitude pass of the ISS tonight, almost directly overhead. All today I listened to forecasts of showers developing at night, and it was showering early this morning. But the clouds vanished late in the day and the sky remains clear even now. No wind and a nice warm (by Melbourne standards) evening.
I happened to have a collection of young people in the house tonight so I offered them an exciting sight in the backyard. Doesn't take much prompting to have young adolescents drop everything and pile out into a dark backyard!
I had carefully planned the timing and had a stopwatch running. We had ten minutes of pointing out stars, and, fantastically, what looked like two Iridium flares to the West, before the ISS was spotted, motoring towards us above the treeline. It was predicted to hit 84 deg and when it did, it clearly outshone Sirius. Most of them seemed quite stoked. It even registered as one bright pixel on their mobile phone cameras!
As I watched it go directly overhead, I checked the stopwatch. 21:20:09 Wow! only 2 secs out, and that was probably my poor estimation of the time of max elevation. We rushed to the other side of the tree to watch it head off south east, with the earth's shadow awaiting. Stopwatch in hand, I started a ten second countdown, and wonderfully, it faded from view over the last five seconds!
How do you know all this stuff, they asked!
Final views ranged from "Awesome!" "Cool!" to "Is that all?"
That was fun. Wed night we can do it all again with much the same magnitude, slightly lower maximum elevation, earlier transit (20:27:53 at maximum elevation), clouds permitting.
Eric
ISS buzzs Melbourne
Before it came and we were looking around the sky, several 12-14 year old sets of eyes said - "What's that little group of stars there?" Seeing where they were pointing, I knew it was the Pleiades, but, I was struggling to see only a few of them. Wish I'd started this hobby 40 years ago. 
I just worked it out. I was thinking, 42 years, that's an old set of bins! About as old as my original 7x50s 
