The shuttle landed at 10:20 AM: here's the whole mission profile. I would have developed the film on the spot, likely in a black cloth bag in the trunk of my Toyota - the Herald Examiner, where I was working at the time, was an afternoon, newstand-sale-newspaper. It was a 90-minute drive from Rosamond to downtown L.A.

I would have tried to get the picture into the earliest PM edition I could (hence developing on site). The artifacts you see in the picture - the graininess and the uneven tones in the sky (under the nose) were caused by developing film in the desert - temperatures at Edwards AFB, situated in the Mojave Desert, get into the 90s (and higher) quickly, even in April, even mid-morning (temperatures overnight were a very different story). The developing time of Kodak D-76, my developer of preference in those days, was too short (about 1 minute at 90+ degrees vs. a normal 7-9 minutes at room temperature) to guarantee even development. It shows up most in evenly-toned areas, like sky.

The 'hot' development means there's little detail in the shadow - black - areas: that's where the tiles, now suspect in Columbia's breakup Saturday, are situated. Lens I used was almost certainly a Nikkor 600mm with a 1.4x extender. Note the motion in the picture (see the hi res version): this was the first time I tried to track something moving around 200 MPH with a very long lens on a tripod (a Bogen - I still have it). I remember distinctly the two sonic booms: one from the nose, one from the elevator.

Truth be known, I have been a total Shuttle freak: I begged my assignment editor to put me on every Shuttle landing (and they all landed at Edwards AFB in the early 80s), which he agreed to, mainly because I would willingly sleep overnight in the desert, and attend the interminable NASA briefings, just to be there.

I didn't think it appropriate to publish this photo until today: I have been a very distant member of the NASA family, but a devoted one, nevertheless. I was last at KSC in April, thanks to colleague Dr. Kathy Clark, formerly NASA chief scientist, and classmate, astronaut, Lee Morin. This has been hard for everbody: but, like everyone who has been close to NASA, I feel great respect for the families of all who flew and worked on STS-107: the people close to the central mission of NASA, and on whom great grief and guilt will have fallen, for all their efforts.

So here's my small tribute: a photo that cost me a night sleeping on the ground at Edwards. NASA people: all regards in this hard time, all respect for your efforts, all hope for solace, closure, and may Grace dictate when it's best that we all move on...
Comments 9:04:56 PM    

So everyone writes the same story: it's called 'pack journalism' in the trade. Local Bay Area stations have reporters in Texas, who are basically telling the same story, with the same pictures, that their Network crews have already provided. Why bother?

I thought that there was far more diversity in Weblogs covering the story Saturday and Sunday than in the national media. Lots of individuals, each with a piece of the story to tell, just published, without looking over their shoulder. This mosaic of pieces began to coalesce in an amazing way, so that the the evidence of the breakaway foam insulation, the orbital anomalies on re-entry, sensor loss etc. emerged early from online sources. It was a bit like the events in Bruce Sterling's near-future novel Heavy Weather... where knowledgeable amateurs become the 'experts'...
Comments 9:24:08 AM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures