Well, we got lucky here in Tucson this morning. As many of you know, the Space Shuttle Endeavour (or OV105) is being flown cross country to it's final home at the California Science Center. Yesterday, Mark Kelly, husband of Garbielle Giffords and commander of Enedavour's last mission, told NASA it sure would be nice if they could do a flyover of Tucson. Tucson is right on the flight path and it wouldn't take much to make it happen, so, NASA made it happen.
I was going to go up to the roof of NOAO but at 11am I got a call from a friend across the street at Steward who told me I could get on their (much higher) roof so I went over there. The flyover was scheduled at 11:15am and it was as close to on time as you can get.
Here is our first view. The tower is part of NOAO (the building where I work).
It veered north toward the Catalina Mountains before it headed back toward campus.
Then it did a nice flyby where I got some closer shots (these are cropped).
I am not going to complain too much here...I think I had a nice view! There was a good crowd of astronomers gathered on the roof to watch this historic flyby and I am happy I got to see the shuttle in the air one last time.
Reprinted with permission from the Half-Astrophysicist Blog.
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7 comments:
Wow hale, those are amazing shots. You were very fortunate.
awesome doesn't seem big enough for this coolness level!
OMG, I was going to say the exact same thing KK did.
Thanks Hale from your jealous irregular.
Still tears me up how they can piggyback that monster.
Wish I was there... Very cool Hale!
I felt a little surge of patriotism just looking at the pictures. Thank you, hale.
Thanks Hale, I wish they would tour the country with this, so more of us could see It. Who cares what It costs? Lots of us don't pay taxes anyhow. LOL
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