Monday, August 17, 2009

Photos | Delta II rocket's red glare and other colorful things at twilight

United Launch Alliance sent up the final Global Positioning System satellite in the Navstar constellation, a location-pinpointing spacecraft that was carried by a Delta II rocket for the last time early, early, early Monday morning. It's a sad moment because these are my favorite launches. Humans without special access to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station can't get closer than this to a launch in the United States. The pier at Jetty Park in Port Canaveral is only a few miles from Launch Complex 17A, and that's where I watched the spectacular liftoff at 6:35 a.m. The sun rose at 6:54. Twilight time!

I blamed the stupidity that sets in when I get tired for underexposing most of these shots. (I had stayed up all night.) After the rocket flew behind a cloud shortly after liftoff, it emerged with glorious brilliance, which I didn't come close to capturing.

The solid rocket boosters - three words that have opening letters of S, R and B - are jettisoned.

Five of the nine boosters are visible. The separation freaked out a lot of people, as they were erroneously thinking that the spacecraft was falling apart. I briefly thought about turning around to run back toward my car while screaming, but I doubted people were stupid enough to believe imminent danger. They would probably wait until they were dead.

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I ditched the useless zoom lens in favor of my old, crappy D40, which isn't really crappy because it did a better job, I thought, of picking up the true colors of the sky.

The pier was packed with human Americans and alien tourists.

I quickly put on my wide-angle lens for this shot.

Whether there's something that warrants singling out or not, someone always feels the need to point, but it satisfies photographers.

One of my favorites. Two men had been fishing off the pier since 3 o'clock Sunday afternoon, and they were clueless as to why hordes of people started showing up around 5 a.m. They had a cooler of bait shrimp and beer. The British tourists - whose children talked with enough of a pronounced accept to annoy Stewie Griffin - made friends with them. The Aussie tourists simply wanted to put their shrimp on the barbie.

The Air Force thinks the sky is its canvas. This is high-tech, highly expensive fingerpainting. The faint streams of smoke to the lower left of the main contrail were produced by the SRBs, the pinky fingers of this rocket.

One of the fishermen just before sunrise. He said he caught two fish in the 16 hours he had been there. The things people do to feed themselves in a recession.

Boats got underway (yes, "underway" is one word in this sense) from Port Canaveral just after the sun popped over the Atlantic's horizon.

Turning just before stepping off the pier, I caught the wisps of clouds coming off the sea, with a little rocket contrail mixed in - a recipe for, well, not much.

And it's daytime again. God bless America for its rocket launches.

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