Night launch
I am still in Florida after yesterday's launch of Endeavour for STS-123. I was lucky enough to obtain causeway tickets for my family, so Dee and I and one of our daughters were able to watch the night launch.

The weather was good for launch, but far too cloudy for good night visibility. Instead of the long arcing trail of light for the whole 8 minutes of powered flight, we got to see the shuttle for only 26 seconds before it vanished into the cloud deck. Still, it makes for a powerful image:




Here we see the launch at T-5 seconds, with the main engines approaching full power:


Here we see the shuttle emerge from behind the huge steam clouds at T+6:



Veterans told me this was a very "disappointing" launch to watch because of the low clouds impeding the launch view, but it was only my second launch, and I was very impressed with the power of the machine. I was also glad it went off on schedule the first time, because I dragged the family down to Florida to watch it.

One things I did notice is that the crowds were bigger. The last launch was poorly attended because most of the people with causeway passes had traveled from Europe in December for the first launch attempt, and were unable to travel back in February for the second attempt.

This time there were more Japanese in the crowd (since the shuttle is carrying the Japanese-built Kibo module for the ISS), and the crowd was 10 deep behind me. Last month we were only 2 deep.