STS-119 pics part 1

As promised, here are some photos from before and just after the Shuttle lifted off Sunday evening.

The crowd where we sat in the lawn of an assisted care high-rise building right by the water:

The view toward the launch pads before anything bright and shiny started to happen:

Now things started happening quickly. By the time the Shuttle clears the tower it is moving at ~100 miles per hour, and continues to rapidly accelerate as it climbs. The focus is off a bit on some of them, sorry:






We couldn't hear any sound of the launch until the vehicle had climbed pretty high in the sky. I think we were about 10 miles or so away from the launch pad, so it makes sense to me that the acoustic energy at launch is so great that it is deadly out to a pretty far distance. The exhaust was bright enough to be a little hard to look directly at, like a little sun had quickly risen and started a bizarre path across the sky.

I will put some more up later this evening, but have a few job hunt-related things to attend to right now, as well as take a nap. I'm fading after the short hours of sleep in a cold car last night.