It was quick and short, but Margie and I got to spend this past weekend in Florida. Margie was going for work related reasons, and I opted to tag along and soak up whatever the Sunshine State had to offer before she went to work on Monday. Well, it was an amazing weekend to say the least. Not only, did we get to soak up some sun, revive our parched skin with gulf coast humidity, and fill our shoes with sand…BUT WE ALSO GOT TO SEE THE SPACE SHUTTLE DISCOVERY LAUNCH FROM CAPE CANAVERAL!!! It was an awesome sight that was completely unplanned. To our benefit, the launch was repeatedly delayed since last Thursday. The launch was finally scheduled for 7:43 PM EDT Sunday, March 15th, and we decided to set up a viewing spot on a public Cape Canaveral Beach. We were about 7 to 8 miles away from the launch site, so our view of the actual launch pad and the actual liftoff was unfortunately inhibited by ground clutter. The sun had set about ten minutes prior, and at 7:43 PM on the dot, we saw an increasing orange glow that filled the lower view of the sky. Then it quickly came into view.

I knew I wouldn’t have time to react fast enough to change settings on my camera, but I did my best which was very challenging with my 300mm lens shaking in my excited hands. Only the flames emitting from the rocket boosters were exposed in most of my shots for the first several seconds of flight. The shuttle itself was too distant to see much detail with the naked eye anyway.

This next shot below was zoomed out to about 70mm, allowing a little more ambient light to seep into the picture.

The trajectory of the Discovery obviously carries it over the Atlantic, and it looks a bit more horizontally exaggerated in these next three pictures.  These were taken 1 minute and 51 seconds into the flight (in sequence) over a span of about 20 seconds.  Look closely at the third picture down and you can see evidence of the release of the two twin solid rocket boosters that are left to fall back into the Atlantic.

In the shot below, you can make out the Shuttle as the brighter upper left spot and the two discarded tanks as the dimmer pair of spots to the lower right of the Shuttle.

The spots were then all out of sight, just over 3 minutes after the liftoff.  The exhaust contrails remained behind, slowly drifting in the winds and soaking up any remaining light with a color shift evident into the higher altitudes.  The shifting colors you see toward the right of the picture are actually noctilucent clouds generated in the mesosphere.  Vapor quickly crystallizes into ice and takes on a whiteish-blue color.

It was a surreal experience that was over within just minutes, but it was by far the highlight of the trip. It was well worth the hours of waiting in traffic afterwards (it took us 5 and a half hours to travel 148 miles back to our hotel in Clearwater).