Angel Jen and I got up at 2:46 AM, girded our loins (I LOVE doing that), packed our hot chocolate, cameras, monopod camera mount, blankets and lawn chairs on our bikes and waddled down to the end of the road, over the highway, down the dirt access road out to the Banana River for the 4:39 AM Saturday night launch of the last night time blast off by a space shuttle. We set up, drank our hot chocolate, unfolded our chairs, plugged in our radios and waited. They canceled the stupid mission five moinutes before blast off time! Those rats!
They said the sky was too cloudy to take off. What kind of a cheap rocket can't even get through a cloud, you might ask. Well, little buddies, the cloud isn't a problem if the rocket is ok, but it prevents the astronauts from landing the shuttle if the rocket messes up and they need to abort the mission. The shuttle is a glider. It has no engines of its own so the astonauts have just one chance to land it and they want to live, too, despite what you might conclude from their career choice.
So we packed up, dejected and went back to the boat. On Saturday night we went to bed early then did it all again, this time without all the chairs, blankets and food. That was just too much to carry!
This time the weather cooperated and the rocket took off. The weird thing is that you couldn't hear a thing from the rocket for the first 15 seconds, by which time the thing was half gone into the sky. That's because sound travels much more slowly than light. 715 mph vs 3x10^9 meters per second, actually. Spend some time on the internet working out the conversion factors, ratios and physics of that, report and discuss.
During my time off I read an article on the internet about photographing the launch by an experienced photographer. It was really helpful. His advice was DON'T TAKE PICTURES. It's much better to watch it without trying to handle a camera, messing up and missing the whole thing. Good advice. So I set up the camera, tied it to a telephone pole with a rope and when they ignited the rocket, I touched off the timed shutter release and watched the blast off. After the single frame of the shutter snapped, I just kept punching the button as the rocket climbed but I wasn't looking through the camera viewfinder. I just counted on the rope and the telephone pole to hold it in place and it worked. Here are two pictures of the thing igniting and then way up in the clouds.
Freud would have a field day with this imagery, but all I see is money going up in smoke.
Quite a show, though!
Have a nice day going over the Newton's second law with the teacher!
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