Shuttle Endeavour Lifts Off!

My husband and I drove to Titusville tonight to watch Shuttle Endeavour lift off into orbit! Titusville is the closest place that the public can see a shuttle launch without paying for tickets to Kennedy, so we fought the traffic, the thousands of people, hiked about two miles, and finally found our spot on a bridge that crosses the Indian River. We were still 10 miles away from NASA, but since we were directly across the river ~ we had an unobstructed view. We could acutally see the launch pads!

I knew that photographing a shuttle launch is a very difficult thing and also I knew that at 10 miles away I had no chance for a close up, especially at night, so my goal was to just get a few shots to share with everyone that just captured how amazing this event is!

I feel so lucky to live only 3o minutes from the Space Coast and that I am able to witness something so powerful! There are people around the world that wish they could see this in person and I have been lucky enough to see two!



I took this first shot with a time lapse of 10 seconds to allow the lights to show up!
I had no tripod so I rested my camera on the concrete railing that was in front of me.
The up lights are launch pad 39A where Endeavour lifted off from, and the orange colored building is NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building where they store and maintain the space shuttles. The VAB is the largest one story building in the world!


LIFT OFF!!!


Again, I was 10 miles away! It was so awesome!



It was SO amazing to also have the moon in the sky when the shuttle was blasting off!
The orange glow of the shuttle was brighter than the moonlight and looks like the sun and moon in the same shot!



My favorite shot of the night! You can see the smoke of the shuttle's path to outer space and the last glimpse of the shuttle's bright circle of light before it left Earth! Amazing! (I had to use a longer shutter speed to let the smoke path show up -so the really bright light is actually the moon's light and the small circle of light is the shuttle!)