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Watch this long exposure of the Atlas V launch kicking off ESA’s Solar Orbiter (SolO)

Feb 14, 2020 by David Williams Leave a Comment

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Norman Peay has always been fascinated by aviation. In this photo, he captured the launch of the Altas V rocket on February 10th, 2020. The launch was set to 11:30 PM from Kars Park, Merritt Island, Florida. Merritt Island offered a gorgeous, unobstructed south view of LaunchPad 41, approximately 10 miles in the distance. This launch should get the ESA’s Solar Orbiter (SolO) started, with an objective to perform close-up, high-resolution studies of the Sun and its inner heliosphere.

Norman gave us an insight into this shot and his passion for rocket photography.

The location

Photographing a night launch can be quite challenging to get the correct exposure. Verifying the trajectory and burn time of the rocket gives you some critical information for setting the exposure time based on the lens you are using. Other factors come into play, such as artificial lighting from your location and other sources such as the moon. On this particular night, there was a full moon adding a very bright light source scene. Something else to remember when shooting a long exposure is it is always better to slightly underexpose your exposure than to overexpose. A photograph slightly underexposed can easily have the dark details corrected, but with an overexposed photograph, the detail is not there, so there is nothing to recover.

The gear

I took this photo using a tripod with a Nikon D810 full-frame camera set in manual mode. I used a Tamron 15-30mm lens set at 15mm to capture the wide-angle of the rocket trail. Knowing the rockets would burn for 180 seconds (three minutes), I set my camera ISO to 64 and chose an aperture of f/16. I used an app on my smartphone to trigger the shutter and to end the exposure at 170 seconds. I probably should mention that I shoot 99% of all my photography set to RAW format.

The subject

Like all photography, you need a primary subject. With landscape or somewhat static subjects, it helps to have a leading object (leading lines) to take your focus to the main subject. A picture of the moon without a supporting subject is just a ball. An image of the same moon shot through some trees or an arch of rocks reveals a source of depth and tells more of a story about the surroundings and the mood.

I composed the palm tree and people in the foreground. I added this detail to make the photo interesting and give the viewer some sense of where this photo was taken.

About Norman

Norman witnessed the last space shuttle launch, Atlantis. He developed a passionate desire to try and photograph future launches since then. Norman has had the opportunity to witness and photograph several launches from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Norman has a website and Facebook Page where more of his work can be seen.

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Filed Under: Inspiration Tagged With: atlas v, cape canaveral, NASA, norman paey, rocket photography, Space X, USAF

About David Williams

Dave Williams is an accomplished travel photographer, writer, and best-selling author from the UK. He is also a photography educator and published Aurora expert. Dave has traveled extensively in recent years, capturing stunning images from around the world in a modified van. His work has been featured in various publications and he has worked with notable brands such as Skoda, EE, Boeing, Huawei, Microsoft, BMW, Conde Nast, Electronic Arts, Discovery, BBC, The Guardian, ESPN, NBC, and many others.

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Alex Baker is a portrait and lifestyle driven photographer based in Valencia, Spain. She works on a range of projects from commercial to fine art and has had work featured in publications such as The Daily Mail, Conde Nast Traveller and El Mundo, and has exhibited work across Europe

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