NASA's Launch Last Week

Preciosaa!!

AWESOME.

Beautiful +Jeff Sullivan 

Wonderful vision, beautifully executed.

This is really cool. Fantastic job on this – the landscape and stars are beautiful enough by themselves, but the satellite arc is awesome.

great capture, the patience paid off really well here 🙂

thou it looks astonishing, it's a mastered photo…making it a bit fake, no offense! 🙂 

Wow wonderful

This defines awe-inspiring. Very well done Jeff!! Are you going to apply to any CCAFS/KSC launches? Hope so!

O

They don't have a schedule per se, follow NASASocial, NASA & all their allies & agencies of interest on Twitter, FB, IG YouTube, etc. for upcoming Social opps. Troll NS timeline and see if anything was recently announced. SpaceflightNow.com does well with launch schedules and Spaceport Magazine is NASA's new magazine for all things NASAKennedy. Pretty sure SpaceflightNow has an RSS too. Crowdfunding proposals have worked for other peeps, so I bet you could to 🙂
Fwiw, I encourage anyone & everyone with any space, astronomy, science interest to apply too! Best experiences ever, with the most diverse people you could ever imagine and the coolest of cool. Enlightening, educational, awe-inspiring and then some all wrapped up into 1 once in a lifetime opportunity. Fair warning: they are addicting!

Film photographs were developed and manipulated in the darkroom, digital photos are manipulated in software.  Without that human influence, the photographer plays no role, adds no value, and is in effect rendered worthless to the overall process.  If photographers added no value, they could all be replaced by webcams.  Fortunately our eyes do not "see" and our brains do not perceive the world in a way even remotely similar to an uninterpreted camera image, our eyes change exposure at every point and the image is constructed in our heads, partly from our expectations and memory.  So straight-out-of-camera images are actually what are fake, failing to look like or achieve what a human perceives, and the intervention of a photographer is often actually needed to restore the result to some semblance of the original experience.  

Making the process a little more challenging is the fact that humans have virtually no color memory.  What I see on the back of my camera onsite and what I see on my monitors actually becomes part of my expectation, therefore my perception and my experience.  As people debate on the Internet what the Milky Way does or doesn't look like, I actually had to go back outside and look at the Milky Way to notice how it might differ from what my camera records and shows me, and how those actual images affected my perception and memory of what the Milky Way looks like.  

In this case the camera does have a bit more sensitivity than our eyes.  The structure of the Milky Way is completely obvious when viewing this scene onsite.  The colors such as the green airglow exist just like an aurora borealis.  The colors were not visible to our eyes, but just because it is not visible to us without the camera does not mean that the green color was added through manipulation or post-processing mastering.  Quite the opposite, it's right there on the camera, virtually every time I shoot at night, and you can see it move over time, just like the aurora borealis.  I think it's cool to have a tool which enables me to see that, the moment the picture is done recording and the image appears on the back of the camera.  Adjustment of the images was extremely minor to render a neutral image.  

No saturation adjustment or colorful camera calibration was used to manipulate or increase color.  I had to minimize adjustments to the images to a compromise which would work over the 600 images and 5 hours of the entire time-lapse sequence I was shooting.  I darkened the entire image 1/4 stop and applied a little contrast (5 out of 100 in Lightroom) to make the sky reasonably dark, as we'd expect on a dark night, and the resulting time-lapse turned out pretty well: 
NASA OCO-2 Satellite Launch – July 2, 2014 1080p HD

There's no lack of too colorful, over-saturated, unrealistic night photography on the Internet.  it is tempting to do that because let's face it, viewers on the Internet like "eye candy" and that can produce a lot of social media points if someone is looking for that kind of attention.  But any child can move a slider in their software to make images look crazy, so I view that as a beginner's move. like a child learning to draw with crayons.  It's not a bad thing, everyone needs to start somewhere.  It is much harder and strikes me as much more of an accomplishment to make the required adjustments, yet end up with a result which is much more accurate and realistic.  

Many people never have truly clear skies or go out to let their eyes adjust for 30 minutes on a moonless night like this, so they have no idea what the Milky Way looks like in dark skies.  Even fewer people have a sensitive camera to also capture the extra color of airglow.  So it's really easy for people to make the accusation "fake", but they're really saying nothing about the video at all.  

People are entitled to their opinion +Alban Krasniqi, but I produce these videos to show people what the night sky actually looks like, so while some people will always be skeptical each time I show a new video, if I reach a few, then I have succeeded.  I invite you to watch some of my meteor shower time-lapse movies on YouTube: Perseid Meteor Shower 2013
You're welcome to have any opinion of them that you like.  I'll be out again August 12-14 for the annual Perseid meteor shower, letting the camera capture and show me what happened all night, while I sleep nearby.  What actually happens, what is actually there over our heads and surrounding us, is so amazing to me, I can't imagine what someone would fake, or how that could possibly produce anything better.  Fortunately I have worked out a new way to process meteor shower images so I will be able to produce even more realistic results.  I'm much more interested in the photography side than processing, so I'm not in any hurry to go back and re-process my old meteor shower images.  I'm much more interested in getting out to capture new night photography, then I'll be able to try those new methods of presenting more of what we see on that new material.

Wooow!!! Great!!!!

Your lucky you shots this amazing event

Will do Jeff. They usually open up application process about 6 wks to 2 mos before launch date. All of the process, & clearances have to be done and finalized no less than 14 days before launches. Usually. Every launch is different and every agency launching has there own criteria as well eg ULA & SpaceX.
TDRS-L launch was special in that a uniquely small lead time and app process was allowed. Viewing spots are different every time also due to trajectory and pad they're using. While SpaceX has a lot of launches on the docket, they are the worst at reliability to launch. Last SX social the participants had to fly back here 3 times. Well some did. Obviously, because at our expense, by actual launch day I'm not sure anyone was left. Huge perk of living local 🙂 I will help ya out all I can though!

Btw, looking again at this image, what is that red fan look off the contrail on left side? Would it be hitting Max Q there?

make a wish

Co to za zjawisko?!

very nice

Impresionante!!

I have several photos showing the red cloud+Tami Mohr-Jones , and it's probably smoke from the extinguished Stage 1, although it could be related to uncovering the satelltie if a large charge is used to get them quickly and safely away form the spacecraft.

I've created a new album of sequential photos from the launch from on G+ here: https://plus.google.com/photos/+JeffreySullivan/albums/6034450980809636577

I've also associated the photos with the launch sequence in a blog post here: http://activesole.blogspot.com/2014/07/NASA-oco2-launch-sequence-NASASocial.html

Google+ created a GIF in the new album animating that Stage 1 to Stage 2 transition as well, and that can illustrate the steps involved.

gib einen Freiraum zum Träumen 🙂

That is fantastic!  Being able to see the three boosters is just amazing, great work!

Awesome

Thank you. This is spectacular.