Nasa moon atlas farokh6/28/2023 ![]() "But at night, it was difficult to find the right spot, and I was set up at the wrong near the wrong telephone pole. "I used a map to count telephone poles from intersections, since there weren't any other discernible details," he said. With just 16 minutes left in the countdown, though, Rice triple-checked his location - and found himself setting up his gear thousands of feet from where he was supposed to be. With "a big stroke of luck," he said, he could fit the rocket's 139-foot-tall frame inside a barely waned full moon. ![]() From there, he calculated, the moon would be rising above the eastern horizon, to align perfectly with the rocket's path to orbit about 22 seconds after liftoff. He was too committed to the idea, having studied weather forecasts, researched shooting alignments and settings with specialized apps (like Photographer's Ephemeris and Flight Club), and pored over maps to stake out the perfect spot: the shoulder of a road near a corn field 3.4 miles from NASA's launch pad. "My brother and his girlfriend were visiting from Atlanta for the week, and I'm the crazy guy who wants to abandon them at night, and go drive three hours down to maybe see a launch," Rice said. He said he wasn't sure he'd try again for the next attempt, the following day at 9:18 p.m. ![]() Rice had driven out for that attempt, losing most of a day and a lot of gas money in the process. The Cygnus spacecraft launch on an Antares rocket was no different: Eighteen seconds before planned liftoff on October 1, the mission was postponed due to a ground control equipment problem, NASA said. In September, for example, nearly all orbital-class launch attempts from US soil were scrubbed. Doing so with rockets require an excess of all three virtues, though, due to additional challenges of geography, weather, curved flight paths, and fickleness. Photographing anything fast flying past the moon requires a combination of luck, planning, and skill, due to the heavenly body's small relative size (roughly that of a thumbnail on an outstretched arm) and constant motion. The mission was to fly 5,000 pounds of air, food, water, spacesuit parts, and scientific experiments - including a $23 million titanium space-toilet prototype - to the International Space Station. Kalpana Chawla," from NASA's launch facility at Wallops Island, Virginia, a three-and-a-half-hour drive away. Yet Rice saw his chance when Northrop Grumman announced it'd fly the Cygnus NG-14 cargo resupply spaceship, dubbed the "S.S. But I never thought there'd be an opportunity to do that." So the thought of the rocket going across the moon has been on my mind. "One of my favorite things to shoot is the space station transiting the moon or the sun through my telescope. ![]() "It's been in my mind for a long time as a fantasy, because - living up here - I don't get too many launches" near home, Rice told Business Insider. But to challenge himself and record a unique perspective of spaceflight, Rice committed to, one day, taking photos and video of a rocket flying in front of the moon. Rice, a 33-year-old Texas native who calls Philadelphia home, had documented about half a dozen space launches up-close. Minutes before liftoff of a NASA rocket mission on October 2, Steve Rice realized he was in the wrong place for a photographic fantasy he'd waited years to make real.
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