Eight Space Shuttles

I know you guys are getting antsy to see some space shuttle pictures, so here's a little composite I threw together. You can see space shuttle Atlantis on STS-129 this past Monday lifting off from pad 39-A at Cape Kennedy. Pretty cool, eh? I took these shots with my Rebel XSi set on manual at 1/400 of a second, f/8, ISO 200. I used a 400mm lens on a 1.6 crop sensor for a length of almost 650mm, and with a polarizing filter to boot. Oh, and did I mention I was 6 miles away? I thought these were awfully good for being so far away.

Breakthrough

When we arrived at Kennedy Space Center Monday morning, the sky was pretty thickly overcast. I began to worry that the launch would be postponed due to poor weather. However, it slowly broke up after about 10 am, but the sky never fully cleared. I guess a few clouds didn't really hurt anything, and may have even helped a little bit. I got this neat picture as Atlantis flew through a low cloud, lighting it up from the inside in a rather spectacular fashion.

Uh-Oh, Part 2

Well, bad luck just seems to follow me around some days. And it seems to be following even more closely lately. After losing my entire hard drive a week or so ago, yesterday I lost my camera. Well, I didn't lose it, but it no longer works. After shooting the shuttle launch as far as the separation of the SRBs, I turned my camera back towards the pad to get some pictures of the lingering steam and smoke. I didn't notice anything odd until the camera quit auto-focusing. I took my eye away from the viewfinder to see a message on the screen. Error 99, it said. Turn the camera off then back on, it said. But that didn't help, it just came right back. I'd seen an error 99 before when I rented an incompatible lens. Pulling the battery out for a second worked then, but not this time. I tried the battery, the battery holder, the lens itself, the memory card, nothing made a difference. Once I got back to a computer, I loaded up the pictures from the memory card (for a while I was worried that none of my pictures would be there, but they were OK). The last dozen or so pictures on the chip were obscured, as if something was in front of the lens, but I knew there had been nothing there while I was shooting. The three pictures you see here are the last three shots from the launch.

After much messing around with the camera itself and some internet searches, I finally discovered that it's a shutter problem. Digital cameras have shutters just like regular cameras. The shutter exposes the image sensor to light for the prescribed amount of time, just as it would expose film. Well, when I peek behind the mirror in my camera, I see the closed shutter when I should normally be able to see the image sensor. I've got a feeling the price of fixing the camera is going to be all too close to the price of a replacement camera.

I suppose I should be happy that my camera didn't break until after the launch. Five minutes earlier and I wouldn't have gotten any of the awesome pictures I did. But I'm still unhappy that it's broken. Anyhow, stay tuned for some of the more awesome final pictures from my camera.

Shuttle Atlantis

I'm dead tired at the moment, but I wanted to get something up quick. I just got home from watching the launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis. It went off without a hitch on the first try at the designated time. I was 6 miles away on a NASA causeway with 1846 other ticket holders. I got some pretty impressive pictures, of which this is just one. Stay tuned...

Uh-Oh

I woke up this morning to a click-click noise coming from the computer room. Sometime during the night, the main hard drive had failed. And it seems to have failed in a big way. It's not just corrupted, it's dead. The motherboard can't see it at all. I'm afraid that I've lost years worth of work. All my old stuff is gone. Well, I guess the worst thing is all my Christmas music. All of the stuff I've recorded in the past couple of years is gone. It's gonna be a lean sharing season this year... :(

Early AM

I figure some of you nutty squirrels out there might want to see what the sunrise looked like this morning. Well, here you go.

Air Force One, Circa 1980

After I posted some pictures of Air Force One the other day, I remembered these old pictures I have from 1980. President Jimmy Carter flew through Lakeland, Florida, on a campaign stop, and Mom pulled me out of school for the occasion. I think I took these pictures with a little Kodak 110 camera, but I'm not sure. Even back then, I was smart enough to take two shots and put them together to get the picture I wanted. Heaven knows how I got so close that the whole airplane wouldn't fit into a single shot. (Pretty sure this was taken well after President Carter had left the airport.) This was in ye olden days when cameras had fixed lenses. Oh, and film, too. The shot below shows one of Lakeland's finest at the time, and that's Air Force One coming in for a landing behind him.

I figured that certain things about former presidents would be public record, but I had no idea. According to documents from Carter's Presidential Library, Air Force One landed at Lakeland Municipal Airport at 11:03 am on October 31st, 1980. I'm surprised there's no note there concerning exactly when some 10 year old kid photographed Air Force One.

Back In The Pokey

Guess who's back in the slammer? That's right, it's our favorite car thief. She's lost 35 pounds and perhaps some of her teeth, but it's still her. Oh, and her hair has changed color. Yes, this is the one who stole my car last year, and still calls my office and yells about how we took her car and her stuff after the death of her estranged husband. We eventually had those calls automatically routed to a voice mail box. It took about 5 days for that box to fill up with 99 messages. About once a month I'd delete a few of them, and a week later it would be full again. I'd wait two months, and she'd still fill it up again when I emptied it. I'm going to empty it now that I know she's in jail to see if maybe she's calling us from the pokey. I should share some of those messages with you...

Twins!

I happened to catch a couple of dolphins frolicking in the water under the New Pass bridge off Longboat Key today. I was wandering over to the Quick Point Nature Preserve when a fisherman pointed out the dolphins. I watched them from shore for a few minutes and realized they kept surfacing in about the same area. So I walked up onto the drawbridge and waited. Sure enough, I caught them coming up for air maybe five or six more times before a boat came through and disturbed them. While this is not the first time I've managed to get pictures of dolphins, these are probably the best I've gotten.

A Bridge So Far

One of the other things I shot last night was the Sunshine Skyway, the bridge across the mouth of Tampa Bay. I'd been meaning to get up there to shoot it since they finished repainting it almost a year ago. This is from the south rest stop, probably a little over a mile away from the center span. The yellow support cables are lit from beneath, so the ones you see the best are the ones you can see the underside of. This was probably a two minute exposure, and that's why the headlights and taillights are long trails on the approach. And it was a nice clear night so you don't see a lot of scattered light in the atmosphere.

A Ghost!

As it turns out, I did spot a ghost yesterday when I was out and about on Mullet Key. As I walked down the beach, I saw this ghost crab duck into his hole in the sand. I crouched down nearby and trained my lens on his hole in hopes that he'd come back out once he thought it was safe. It took a little bit, but he did come back out and here's the picture to prove it. It's been years and years since I got a picture of one of these guys. I think the previous shot was so old it pre-dates the blog. No, I'm mistaken. It was 2005, the first year of the blog, and you can see it here.

The Moon On Halloween

Here's a picture of the almost-full moon tonight. It's not quite full, but I think that's going to happen tomorrow. I haven't shot the moon in quite a while, but there it was tonight, almost daring me to try and take it's picture. So I did.

Sunset

Not much of a sunset this evening, I'm afraid. I expected more, since it is Halloween and all. This is from Fort Desoto and that's Egmont Key out there on the horizon. And the little spot of light would be the lighthouse on Egmont Key.

Air Force One

When I first arrived at Sarasota International Airport this afternoon, this was a view. A big 747 sitting there, all decked out in blue & white, labeled United States Of America on the side. There were a few hundred people gathered on the side of the road watching. Technically at this point, you're looking at just another plane. Just another really big plane, though. SRQ isn't a big airport, and most of the little Delta jets that flew out while I was waiting were dwarfed by this big guy.

By the time I took this shot, the plane was officially Air Force One. President Obama had transferred from his Marine One helicopter into this plane. It's only officially designated Air Force One when the President is on board. And take it from me, unless they pulled the old switcheroo while I wasn't looking, Obama was on board this plane. From the time he got on until they began to taxi was less than two minutes. I guess being the President has it's perks.

And once they taxied, they turned and took off. No delays for this bird.

This is the second time I've seen Air Force One. The first time was 1979 when Jimmy Carter was running for re-election against Ronald Reagan. He flew in and out of Lakeland Linder Regional Airport, and my Mom took me out of school to go see him. I've got pictures of that somewhere, I wonder if I can find them...

Marine One

As I mentioned a second ago, I spotted President Obama as he passed through Sarasota today. He flew back into our little airport aboard Marine One, the designation for the helicopter in which the President flies. I was having a hard time figuring out which chopper was actually Marine One because all of a sudden there were five Marine helicopters landing. I knew the President was on one of them because they had closed the road in front of me to traffic seconds before they came into range. The first two helicopters landed and disgorged 10-15 people each, but none of them looked important enough to be guarded. Then another chopper landed over near me next to a back-up bird that had been there since I arrived. A fourth and slightly smaller helicopter then flew in, landing between the first two. Only a few people got out of that one, and it wasn't met by many people. The fifth and final whirlybird took a slightly different path than the others, so I figured that was the one. All of these pictures show that helicopter as it came in and landed in front of Air Force One.



Look close at this picture and you can see a Marine standing at attention and saluting as President Obama prepares to exit the helicopter.

The President Of The United States Of America

Care to guess who came to town today? You probably won't be able to tell from these pictures, but trust me when I say that President Barack Obama is in these shots. He flew into Sarasota this morning to visit the new solar power plant in Arcadia, and I caught him after he was flown back to the airport, during the short walk from Marine One to Air Force One. I would guess he was on the tarmac no more than a minute. That's him in the center of the photo above, in front of the satellite truck for channel 8. Marine One is to the right.

As you can see, Obama was moving on. I don't think he even stopped to wave at anyone during his walk. These pictures are crops of much larger shots, and I really couldn't see what he was doing as he walked. In fact, I wasn't even certain I'd caught him. But I went by the comments from the folks around me who had binoculars and better eyesight. We were all observing from an access road behind the airport, maybe a quarter mile away. You can see the nose of Air Force One intruding in on the picture above.

I hadn't planned on going up to the airport at all, but after lunch I decided that I needed to at least ride by to see what I could see, and I was glad I did. My timing couldn't have been much better.

One thing that I didn't think of as I was shooting these pictures was the heat rising from the runways. Most of the distortion you see in these shots is due to the hot air rising from the tarmac that I was trying to shoot through. But this is probably as close as I'll ever get to a sitting president with my camera. I shook hands with Bill Clinton once when he visited UF, but I didn't have a camera at the time.

Tickets!

Well, it's official. I was finally able to secure tickets to a shuttle launch! So when Atlantis launches to the International Space Station on or about November 16th, I'll be in the audience. This ticket gets me to the closest publicly available viewing site, a causeway on the Banana River about 6 miles from launch pad 39A, actually on NASA property. I can picture the pictures now! I need to rent a good lens... This is a vastly different view of the launch in addition to being closer. I'll be looking to the north (north by north-east, I think) instead of east (OK, east by south-east...).

I think this is one of the last six shuttle launches, so time is running out to catch one. If you get the chance to see one, take it!