Delta 4 Slices the Night Sky

Space Coast living has a unique benfit: we get to watch missile launches. They are always different and always impressive. Even though we're 20 miles south of Cape Canaveral we got a great view of the Delta 4 night launch on Dec-05. A great rumble really topped it off. The Delta 4 vehicle carried a WGS 3 satellite to geosynchronous orbit.

For this picture I attached a Canon 40D DSLR to my table top camera tracking mount to keep the stars from trailing during the long exposures. The missile trail was captured with a 4 minute exposure. ImagesPlus was used for most of the image processing. The constellation lines were added with Photoshop to make it easier to see the apparent path of the missile through the sky.