On 9/23/2012 1:41 PM, John Sessoms wrote:
From: David Mann
On Sep 22, 2012, at 9:23 AM, John Celio
<neo.venator.com+p...@gmail.com> wrote:
Shot with my K5 and M* 300mm f4 (at f11):
http://i.imgur.com/VGco5.jpg
What a fantastic photo and it must have been a real experience. I
had a poster of the shuttle on my wall when I was a kid. I still
have it somewhere.
I really do wish I could have watched a shuttle launch. I have an
audio file of one which I downloaded from somewhere. The shuttle
must be one of the loudest things ever made.
Dave
It must have been 2010 when I was in a presentation by George Lepp on
a Sunday morning & the guy sitting next to me kept fidgeting & asking
"How long is he going to be? I've got to get out of here!". Talked to
the guy at the break & he told me he was to meet some friends to drive
down to Florida because the LAST night shuttle launch was going to be
at 4:00 am on Monday (originally scheduled for Sunday, it was delayed
24 hours).
After the presentation, driving back to Raleigh, I decided WHAT THE
HELL ...
Got to Titusville about midnight & found a place to park right on the
Indian River for $20. You could just barely see the Shuttle launch
tower all lit up. The shuttle itself was mostly hidden on the other
side of the tower.
The photos I got aren't very good, but I got to see the shuttle launch.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jb_sessoms/8016127380/in/photostream/lightbox/
Looking at the mission schedule, that was Endeavour.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-130
The sound wasn't as loud as I expected it to be. I saw the Apollo 14
launch from the embankment of an overpass out on I-95 in 1971 and my
memory is that it was much louder even from so much farther away.
The difference between Kerosene and Hydrogen fueled engines.
The view was spectacular. On a night launch you could follow the
shuttle all the way to when they cut off the main engines. By that
point it wasn't much more than the brightest star you've ever seen,
but you could really see it moving & follow it easily.
A week after I got back from my impromptu journey, I talked to my
sister and she was mad as hell. Turned out she was a Shuttle freak and
had made 3 trips to Florida to see Shuttle launches, even paying for
VIP access to the viewing area on Merritt Island and all three
launches were postponed and she never got to see any of them.
--
Don't lose heart, they might want to cut it out, and they'll want to avoid a
lengthly search.
--
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