Apollo 10 was a full "dress rehearsal", the only one in the Apollo program. The ship was identical to the one used for Apollo 11, and everything progressed — on board and on land — just as if a landing was going to happen. The Lunar Module was deployed on 23 May with Thomas P. Stafford and Eugene A. Cernan on board, leaving John W. Young alone in the command module, and it descended towards the Moon, spending six hours away from the Command Module and getting as close as 15.7km from the surface before going back up and docking.

The mission landed safely on 26 May on the Pacific Ocean, some 500km east of the American Samoa islands, and after that NASA was ready for the "real deal" with Apollo 11.

Commander Thomas Stafford left NASA soon after (ostensibly due to not having been selected to fly Apollo 13) and never returned to space; Young landed on the Moon with Apollo 16 in 1972 and flew the Space Shuttle's inaugural mission in 1981, among other missions; and Cernan has the distinction of being so far the last person to have been on the surface of the Moon, as a crew member on Apollo 17.

In November 1998, this is what the ISS looked like. That's the control module Zarya (Russian for "dawn"), which was launched by Russia and was the first piece of the ISS to reach orbit. It was, indeed, fairly small: only 13 metres long from end to end (the solar panels span a bit under 25 metres). It was joined a few weeks later by module Unity, carried to orbit by Endeavour.

By 2002, the station had grown considerably. It retained basically this shape for several years, and I guess that's the shape many people think of when they think of the ISS — "lopsided", with solar panels only at one end.

And this is what it looks like now, after the recent mission; it is now 73 metres long and 104 metres wide, with the solar panels fully extended. It is still not complete, though: there are four more assembly missions in the schedule, two by NASA's space shuttles and two by Russian crafts. Assembly won't be completed until late 2011, at the earliest.

Still, with its very large (and reflective) solar panels, the ISS is already the brightest object visible in the sky (with the exception of the Sun and the Moon, of course) and can easily be seen from the ground if you know where (and when) to look; I recommend using the website Heavens Above for that. With a reasonable telescope and on a good day, you should be able to see the shape of the station in detail, but even small binoculars should allow you to see that it's a large object (and not simply a point of light).

(and for anyone interested, NASA has a much larger sequence of pictures showing the assembly of the station; they don't yet include the results of the latest mission, though)

A penumbral eclipse happens when the Moon goes through the penumbra of the Earth, the area of "partial shadow" around the main shadow of the planet. Viewed from the Moon, this appears as a partial solar eclipse (an umbral eclipse is seen from the Moon as a total solar eclipse).

In eastern Australia, the eclipse starts at 23:36 AEST AEDT (12:36 UTC), with the maximum eclipse at 01:38 tomorrow morning (14:38 UTC). Visually, you will see one "corner" of the full Moon clearly darker that the rest of the disk. More information and a visibility diagram can be seen at the HMNAO eclipse's website.