Shuttle Atlantis lifting off

This was a pretty awesome sight.  We parked at the Cocoa Beach Pier, and walked for quite some distance from the pier.  We got a better view, I suppose being closer to the launch.  But it was still at a distance. 

We might have gotten a better view if we had spent more time and energy trying to get Titusville.  As we figured it though, Titusville was probably packed with too many people.

We had a good time walking on the beach, and into a Cape Canaveral neighborhood.  We met a guy from Colorado who was down here for a week just to see the shuttle go up.  We also saw some other guys with pretty nice digital cameras with interchangeable lenses.  They were younger, apparently still employed with the sale of consumer electronics, or at some point in the past were.  The guy from Colorado was with some electrical engineering firm, or something.  

That was the original shot from which the above shot was cropped and resized, I guess within my digital camera (Nikon S8100).  Several of the pictures of liftoff were not good, due to the auto-focus, but what the heck, all it takes is one good shot.

We had an enjoyable time getting back to the car, and traffic was consierably worse leaving the area than when we arrived, but we stopped for lunch at Friendly's, and stopped at Florida Institute of Technology's campus to walk around the Botanical Gardens some.  We asked at the library how many students were on campus, and there was a number about 6,000, but it was unclear if that included the online students or not, apparently, there is a rather large number of online degree seeking students.