All posts tagged "Space Shuttle Columbia"

At 5:53am on the morning of February 1, 2003, Sarah and I stood on Bernal Hill in San Francisco looking west in the sky. Broken low clouds had barely parted enough for us to find what we had come for, above the western horizon. “There it is,” I said, as a pale orange dot began to brighten and move slightly north. I aimed my camera and began a series of time exposure pictures of the elongating orange trail. Repositioning the camera about every 10 seconds, I captured five images of the Space Shuttle Columbia, as it flew from hundreds of miles offshore, passed north over Napa Valley, then Tahoe and into Nevada. It was over in less than 2 minutes.