CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Standing in the parking lot of the Titusville Hobby Lobby was maybe something I should have planned on before traveling to Florida for the launch of NASA's Nancy Roman Grace Space Telescope, but it was not where I expected to be until I was speeding there in my car.
Rocket enthusiasts and locals around Florida's Space Coast gathered Sunday morning (Aug. 30) to watch SpaceX's latest Falcon Heavy launch. The triple-booster rocket launched NASA's newest flagship observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is now on its way to an orbital sweet spot nearly 1 million miles from Earth to image the widest views of the universe ever captured, map planets around alien stars and usher in a new wave of discovery into phenomena like dark matter and dark energy.
Liftoff occurred at 07:26:49 a.m. EDT (11:26:49 GMT), from Launch Complex-39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC). Specifying those 49 seconds was very important. Roman's launch opportunity is known as an "instantaneous" launch window because its proper orbital delivery was dependent on getting the time right down to the very second. And the seconds mattered for those watching the launch, too. Any fewer, and the clouds from viewing the location of dozens of photographers at Hobby Lobby, myself included, wouldn't have cleared in time. Any more and the sun would have moved too high in the sky to capture what me and all those photographers were hoping to capture.
Josh Dinner is a Spaceflight Writer for Space.com. He also photographs rockets. Sometimes, from a Hobby Lobby parking lot...
The early morning launch got off the ground a little more than 20 minutes after sunrise, while the bright glowing orb was still relatively low in the sky. The Space Coast's eastward shores on the Atlantic Ocean, coincidentally, sometimes offer the rare alignment with one of the missions launching from KSC for a rocket to fly right in front of the sun on its way to space, but only from specific vantage points.
Plotting and predicting the trajectories of a launch vehicle is no easy task, but it is made incredibly simpler using certain softwares like the popular FlightClub.io, which is used by many photographers to help line up shots that would be nearly impossible without a rocket's flight trajectory info before launch. That, and apps like PhotoPills or The Photographer's Ephemeris are incredibly useful for planning rocket launch photos ahead of time.
It's rare for a launch to line up just right, and even more rare for a launch vehicle like Falcon Heavy, which flies far less often than SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, to line up for a solar transit the way Roman's launch did. The sun rises in a slightly different spot on the horizon each day, and even a few minutes delay in a launch can be enough for the sun to move out of alignment of where the rocket is going to fly. And the alignment for Roman's launch happened to be in the parking lot of Hobby Lobby.
I hadn't checked FlightClub.io, and was so focused on other parts of launch coverage for Roman's mission, I didn't think to check if a transit was in the cards for Sunday morning. But as the excitement for launch built, and the days until Roman's launch dwindled, excitement over the possibility of a solar transit spread among the photojournalists at KSC.
Shooting the transit, though, meant leaving KSC during launch, which meant sacrificing literal front row seats to one of the world's most powerful rockets. The KSC press site sits just three miles (4.8 km) LC-39A. Hobby Lobby in Titusville, on the other hand, is about 12 miles away (19 km). And there were some concerns about clouds, too.
Weather during Saturday's prelaunch mission briefing forecasted only a 50% of favorable weather conditions for Sunday, and when the morning of launch arrived, clouds on the horizon weren't showing obvious signs of clearing in time for liftoff.
I was torn.
I didn't want to sacrifice getting a shot of the launch by leaving KSC if the clouds were going to persist, but if it worked, this would be my first ever solar transit rocket launch photo. About an hour before launch, Space Scout's David Diebold popped into the KSC press site, and told me when I asked him that of course he was going to try for the shot. "No guts, no glory," he said. He was on his way out the door as he said it. David also offered to lend me one of his solar filters for my camera, which was another very influential factor in my decision.
It takes about 25 minutes to get from the press site at KSC to the strip in Titusville where Hobby Lobby sits, and the launch was about 45 minutes away. Checking the clouds one more time, I decided to take the chance. "No guts, no glory," I told my fellow Space.com reporters, who were able to manage things from the press site in my absence.
I jumped in my car and headed to Hobby Lobby.
Everyone else who tried for this shot was already there when I arrived, and so were hundreds of other launch spectators across the street, lining the stretch of spots along the Banana River where several launchpads stand in view. Thankfully, I was able to squeeze in between fellow launch photographers Andrew McCarthy from Consider the Cosmos, and NASA Space Flight's Max Evans, both of whom generously offered me some last-minute advice for my camera settings.
I shot on a Canon R5 Mark II, an absolute unit of photography engineering and one of Canon's newest full-frame mirrorless cameras, with an RF100-400mm F5.6-8. With my lens zoomed all the way up to 400 and my solar filter from David on the end, I cranked the R5's exposure down to 1/20000 and set aperture to F16 and waited with just a few minutes until liftoff.
It wasn't until those last minutes that the clouds finally did clear. Someone listening to SpaceX's live stream began a countdown from 5 seconds, and everyone went silent and hands and eyes moved to cameras and viewfinders.
"Liftoff."
I didn't even look up to try to see if I could make out the rocket on the horizon. I just waited for a moment seconds later when Falcon Heavy flew across the face of the sun. It happened in a split second. I just held my finger down on the shutter button and hoped.
Rocket launches are inherently risky endeavors. Millions of dollars go into designing and building the unique satellites sent to orbit, and millions more on the launch vehicles that get them there. But launches don't always go as planned, and the nature of rockets means that if something goes wrong, often things go very wrong. They are, after all, vehicles channeling controlled explosions through Earth's turbulent atmosphere into the unforgiving vacuum of space.
But we do it anyway. We send the amazing things into the cosmos to expand humanity's understanding of the universe. Like the new era of discovery about to be ushered in as Roman journeys to its final destination in orbit, we take the risks because the payoffs are so tremendous. And when we do, it makes getting the shot that much better.
No guts, no glory.