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Description
STS-123 Endeavour, launched 2:28am March 11, 2008

From the NASA causeway, using a 24mm lens at f20 with a 0.9 ND filter (-3 stops).

This 39 second time-lapse exposure was started at T-10 seconds in the countdown, and terminated early at T+29 seconds when the shuttle disappeared into a low cloud layer.

The usual goal at a night-launch is to get a long glowing trail of the whole 8 minutes of powered flight. The clouds prevented that, but instead we get an interesting fire tornado or lightning bolt effect.

I used the long-exposure noise reduction mode of the 1Ds3, but it's not clear that it makes much difference for only 39 seconds.

If I could have done this over, I'd have shot at f22 with the 0.9 ND filter, to further reduce the exposure.

Description
STS-123 Endeavour, launched 2:28am March 11, 2008

From the NASA causeway, using a 24mm lens at f20 with a 0.9 ND filter (-3 stops).

This 39 second time-lapse exposure was started at T-10 seconds in the countdown, and terminated early at T+29 seconds when the shuttle disappeared into a low cloud layer.

The usual goal at a night-launch is to get a long glowing trail of the whole 8 minutes of powered flight. The clouds prevented that, but instead we get an interesting fire tornado or lightning bolt effect.

I used the long-exposure noise reduction mode of the 1Ds3, but it's not clear that it makes much difference for only 39 seconds.

If I could have done this over, I'd have shot at f22 with the 0.9 ND filter, to further reduce the exposure.