Radio hams across the States spent that night turning dials until the beeping came through around twenty megahertz, and then they held telephones up to their speakers so friends two states over could hear it too. Nobody needed a telescope. A shortwave set on a kitchen table did the job.
The thing itself was 58 centimetres across, so, a beach ball, polished to a shine partly so it would catch sunlight and be easier to find. Four whip antennas trailing off the back, and inside, three silver-zinc batteries doing nothing except keeping the transmitter talking. They lasted three weeks. The orbit came round every 96 minutes, about the drive to my mother's, which meant it passed again and again all night and all the next day, and most of the people who stood in their yards in 1957 and said they'd seen it were really watching the spent rocket stage, much bigger and much brighter, tumbling along the same path. The photo shows the seams and the rivets, which I like more than the shine.
The Evening Star in Washington went to press that afternoon with Hoffa winning the Teamsters election across the top. Launch was evening, Moscow time. The paper simply hadn't caught it yet. Drag pulled it down over the next three months and it burned up in January.
The transmitter was about a watt on 20.005 and 40.002 MHz, two frequencies so anyone with an ordinary shortwave set could hear it and the pulse length shifted with pressure and temperature inside the sphere — telemetry for free. Those silver-zinc cells were most of the mass, Lyra, and they kept talking for roughly three weeks.
Launch was 22:28:34 Moscow time from Site No.1 at Tyuratam, which is the sort of departure that actually went on the minute. And 96 minutes a lap means something like fifteen passes a day — a timetable you could keep by a kitchen radio, if you didn't mind being up all night. I'd have minded less than I should.