SPACE SHUTTLE NIGHT LAUNCH
This is a 5 minute time exposure of the Space Shuttle Launch on 11-24-94. I took this from the breakwater behind Big Toho Marina on Kissimmee's Lake Toho lakefront. If someone cared to look up the records, I am sure one could find out which shuttle it was. I started the exposure on Kodak VR 400 film (120 format on Hasselblad) and held the shutter open when I saw the glow. Where the glow thins at the top, if you look carefully, you can see the glow from the two boosters falling away. From the Cape to Kissimmee, I could still hear the Nasa Select channel on my scanner, so I knew exactly when the countdown was on. I heard the NASA spokesman state, as I visually observed the shuttle go down over the optical horizon, that it was crossing an imaginary line extended from Virginia / North Carolina out into the Atlantic Ocean, at a height of about 70 or 80 miles if I remember correctly. This was film, not digital, and I didn't know what I had until we developed it and made a contact sheet the next day.