Five Minutes During NASA's OCO-2 Satellite Launch

Star trails shot covering 5 minutes of the satellite's journey into space after the launch, captured as ten 30 second exposures, then combined into this image.  My overall coverage of the launch was a little more involved.  I first placed myself high on a hill to get above the fog.  Of course then I couldn't see where the rocket would launch down in the fog.  So I used the application +The Photographer's Ephemeris to show a +Google Maps image with the sun and moon angles on top.  So I could see relative to both sunset shortly after 8 pm and moon set around 11 pm approximately where the rocket would launch and emerged from the fog.  

I knew that the Milky Way would move to the Southwest by the time of the 3am launch, so I decided to set up a camera to also capture a time-lapse video of night images following the Milky Way, and ending up at more or less the right point by 3 am to also catch the rocket launch, then continue until 4 am.  I verified the movement of the Milky Way through 3 am in an iPhone app called StarWalk.  

So I shot a time-lapse of the moon setting at 11 pm with one camera and telephoto lens, started the Milky Way tracking camera with a wide angle lens, went to sleep for the next 3+ hours, then woke up 40 minutes ahead of the launch to start a telephoto time-lapse looking directly at the launch point.  Once I had the second time-lapse camera going with an external intervalometer timer, I was free to capture it in live video on a third camera as well.  

I figured that it would be pretty comical to see me operating 3 cameras, so I wanted to have a fourth, +GoPro camera also capturing video of me doing all of this with the rocket launch occurring in the background, but I was also setting up an iPhone to play the NASA TV live feed to have the mission coverage and countdown as background narration for all of my live video.  For some reason I was having trouble getting my iPhone to connect (although I had done it earlier for practice).  I managed to get NASA TV running on a second iPhone, but at the last moment the launch seemed to occur just a little early, so I ran out of time to finish everything in progress and start that "behind the scenes" video in time.

I made a blog post yesterday with a link to a new version of my time-lapse video footage including these images, on +Vimeo : http://www.MyPhotoGuides.com/2014/07/nasa-launch-orbiting-carbon-observatory-OCO2.html
#NASA    #NASASocial #space #news #science #OCO2

NASA’s OCO-2 Orbiting Carbon Observatory – star trails shot covering 5 minutes of the satellite’s journey into space after the launch.

Blog post with latest time-lapse footage:http://activesole.blogspot.com/2014/07/nasa-launch-orbiting-carbon-observatory-OCO2.html
#NASA #NASASocial #space #news #science #OCO2

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