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tuezday1

Shuttle launch

tuezday1
17 years ago

I thought you guys might be interested in seeing these pictures.

On December 7th the first night time shuttle launch in 4 years went off. I wasn't expecting to be all that impressed but OMG, it was incredible. Pictures don't do it justice. You have to see it to believe it. Paul shot these still pics. I was planning on taking a video of it with the other digital camera but quickly realized I was missing the show fiddling with the camera. So I turned it off and just watched in awe. Although I state in the description of one of the pictures that we were 11.4 miles away, it was actually 10.2 miles. You could read a paper the sky lit up so bright. Based on when I turned the video off on the camera, we were so far away it took about 30 or 40 seconds for the sound to reach us.

We were in Titusville just across the bridge heading to Merritt Island which is as close as the general public can get.

Naturally we met interesting people. One guy was retired from NASA and used to drive the crawler that takes the shuttle from the VAB to the launch pad (only 8 people have that certification, what have you). Met a couple from New Mexico who keep coming out to see it but the launches would get canceled the whole time they were here. One time they extended their vacation by 3 weeks, it went off the day after they left. I hope they got to see it this time (at first it was scheduled to go off Thursday but that was canceled with 6 seconds to go and it finally went of Saturday night). We met a Russian couple and their friends who were here visiting. Turns out they live less than a mile from us, so after Christmas we are going to get together again.

A cousin of mine who lives about 40 miles away in SE Orlando, had quite a show from his house.

These pics were taken with my Nikon D80 with a 300mm lens. Because of all the moisture in the atmosphere making a super sharp picture impossible, Paul opted for the 300mm rather than the 1000mm which would have caused more distortion issues. Other than being compressed (too much, but I didn't do it)these pictures have not been retouched at all.

Enjoy.

http://flickr.com/photos/tuezday1/sets/72157594413140764/

Laura

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