Picture Post, Sunday June 10, 2007

This is a picture of the Melbourne Causeway, linking Melbourne, Florida with Indialantic, Florida. That's our Camry on the left there, and this is where we parked to watch Shuttle Atlantis lift off Friday evening. This is looking west toward the mainland of Florida.

This next photo is looking east, toward the island and the Atlantic Ocean. You can see how, even 30 miles or so south of Kennedy Space Center, the roadsides clog up with folks parking and waiting to see the shuttle. The closer to the Space Center, the worse the traffic and gridlock.

This is Atlantis up pretty high in the sky, and about one minute after leaving the ground, and before releasing the solid rocket boosters I showed a picture of yesterday.

Just after the solid rocket boosters were released, I zoomed back out to wide angle to show the scene were we were standing, with the plume of smoke from the liftoff in the distance.

After the launch, we went to the Barnes And Noble in Melbourne, and bought some books. When we walked out into the parking lot, this was the magical looking sky we saw. Fortunately I had even carried my camera into the book store, and set it up for low light shooting and took a bunch of photos, hoping to be able to catch in some small way just how beautiful the clouds and the sky were. This was the best shot of the bunch. My heart soared just looking at this sky. It was as if God was (were?) saying to us, look, there's still beauty in this world. By the way, that 'star' up in the upper center of the sky is our closest planetary neighbor, Venus.

Here's another one of the spiffy sky in front of Barnes And Noble Friday night.

The sky outside of Barnes And Noble was every bit as exciting to watch as the shuttle liftoff was. There were folks in the parking lot trying to take photos of the sky with their cell phone cameras. When Number Two Daughter got home later, she had been out with some friends and they stood and watche the sky and she showed me her cell phone photos too.