A few days back I posted a picture of the recent shuttle launch. Here's another view:
![i-9e5d2cf73835411e3831eea4af08bd15-480_DiscoveryOrion_aurigema_c720[5].jpg](http://scienceblogs.com/strangerfruit/wp-content/blogs.dir/280/files/2012/04/i-9e5d2cf73835411e3831eea4af08bd15-480_DiscoveryOrion_aurigema_c720[5].jpg)
This is a four minute time exposure of the exhaust plume along Discovery's path against the background of the starry sky. As APOD notes:
At the upper left, the end of the drifting plume is punctuated by Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka in a vertical line, the belt stars of Orion. To the right of the belt stars, the pinkish jewel in Orion's sword is not a star at all, but the great Orion Nebula. Still farther to the right, at the foot of the hunter, lies Rigel, the brightest star in view. Rigel is a hot supergiant star some 700 light-years in the distance.
Visit Astronomy Picture of the Day for the larger version of this picture.
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“Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.” -William Shakespeare
I discerned huge Orion, driving wild beasts together over the field of asphodel, the very ones that he once had killed on lonely mountains, he grasped in his hands a mace of bronze, never to be broken.
-Odysseus, in the Underworld, The Odyssey
“Everyone has his dream; I would like to live till dawn, but I know I have less than three hours left. It will be night, but no matter. Dying is simple. It does not take daylight.
"...innumerable stars, thousands of double and multiple systems, clusters in one blaze with their tens of thousands of stars, and the nebulae amazing us by the strangeness of their forms and the incomprehensibility of their nature, till at last, from the limit of our senses, even thes
Back in the dark ages (= early 1960s) I spent a couple of years at the Cape playing with Polaris. Night launches of the big liquid-fueled vehicles -- early Saturns, for example -- were amazing sights, particularly on the occasions when the range safety officer pushed the destruct button when an errant bird was just a few miles downrange. IIRC, the first Saturns were clustered kerosene and LOX engines, and they made spectacular fireworks when all that fuel blew at once.