"What a strange pattern the shuttle of life can weave." - Frances Marion

Finally after one aborted attempt a year ago, I got to experience my first shuttle launch. I arrived a few hours early and was able to pick up a NPS Passport Stamp for the Canaveral National Seashore at the park headquarters in Titusville. Unfortunately the rest of the park is closed several days prior to shuttle operations, so I couldn't collect any others.

I found a decent area on US 1 just north of Hwy 50 that was a small city or county park with a dock. I figured this would be a good spot (with a view of the pad) to also be able to hear and feel the liftoff. My friend Sophie and one of her associates had spent the day at the Kennedy Space Center and after finishing there came to join me in a space I had reserved.

I think a shuttle launch is something all kids should get a chance to experience as it really can help open the wonders of science. I was surprised as to how long it took for the sound to travel the 12 miles after ignition. I used my Canon XT with 300mm zoom lens to get most shots and was fairly pleased with the performance. Next time I'll definitely have to borrow another extra camera so I can try to get some time lapse shots. I will try to make future launches so I can get more shots and also really get a chance to watch the while sequence instead of focusing on the camera, but had no regrets about it.

While we were waiting for traffic to die down a bit (massive number of people all trying to leave at once is insane), we watched as some really near smoke/steam trail formations formed overhead. It is a shame that undoubtedly most people missed this aspect that I would suspect to be fairly unique, and actually quite stunningly beautiful. While I'll have to work with schedules to see if I can make future day launches, I will undoubtedly make every attempt to go to the next night launch, whenever that may be as the pictures I have seen would make any attempt at viewing this spectacle worthwhile. Here is a link to a NAVY study concerning the noctilucent cloud contrail or 'shuttle clouds'. More infor can be found also at http://www.spaceweather.com/with a nice Flickr set that showed off some of the colors at http://www.flickr.com/photos/35423990@N00/sets/72157600329483616/

Does anyone know how to string together a series of pictures into a movie files (or even one of those animated GIFs)? It is something I've always wanted to try. Pictures can be found here: http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=vnlbugz.a5amn37r&x=0&y=b13uzd

Update: I found a neat little service call Glickr that will take a series of up to 10 photos and put them into an animated GIF, but I am still looking for a way to take more of them and build it into something larger. Here is a sample of what it produced by that site;



After looking around a bit more, it seems that Microsoft Movie Maker does what I've been wanting, at least in making some of my pictures into movie. I love technology! Here is an example of the movie [~1MB] I created with the pictures I took of the launch.

http://mblitch.googlepages.com/shuttlelaunch2.wmv

I'm going to try to embed it into this blog post as well.