WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. ââ¬â Groggy from a late night watching the Yankees, frigid from a chilled airplane cabin, Stefanie Gordon stirred to action after the pilot's announcement. Lifting her iPhone to the plane's window, she captured an otherworldly image that rocketed around the globe as fast as her subject: Space shuttle Endeavour soaring from a bank of clouds, its towering plume of white smoke lighting the azure sky.
She had never imagined the response her airborne image ââ¬â capturing the last launch of Endeavour and the next-to-last space shuttle flight ââ¬â would ignite. The images and video have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on Twitter alone, landed on network newscasts and been published in newspapers worldwide.
In turn, they've made a photographic celebrity of sorts of the unemployed 33-year-old from Hoboken, N.J.
It just blew up, she said of the attention.
Gordon caught an early Delta flight from New York to West Palm Beach on Monday to visit her parents and had a whole row to herself, never imagining the history she would record.
She stretched out and took a nap. Then she awoke shortly before the pilot announced the descent had begun and a sighting of the shuttle was possible. She had forgotten Endeavour was even taking off at 8:56 a.m. EDT, but readied her iPhone just in case.
Then, the pilot came on again, alerting passengers the shuttle was in sight.
Everybody ran over to the east side of the plane, Gordon said Tuesday, and all of a sudden there it was in the clouds.
All told, she shot 12 seconds of footage of the shuttle arcing on its simple stream of smoke into space. She also shot three still photographs.
Link to video and pictures: http://news.yahoo.com/video/local-15749667/25265766#video=25265766
She had never imagined the response her airborne image ââ¬â capturing the last launch of Endeavour and the next-to-last space shuttle flight ââ¬â would ignite. The images and video have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on Twitter alone, landed on network newscasts and been published in newspapers worldwide.
In turn, they've made a photographic celebrity of sorts of the unemployed 33-year-old from Hoboken, N.J.
It just blew up, she said of the attention.
Gordon caught an early Delta flight from New York to West Palm Beach on Monday to visit her parents and had a whole row to herself, never imagining the history she would record.
She stretched out and took a nap. Then she awoke shortly before the pilot announced the descent had begun and a sighting of the shuttle was possible. She had forgotten Endeavour was even taking off at 8:56 a.m. EDT, but readied her iPhone just in case.
Then, the pilot came on again, alerting passengers the shuttle was in sight.
Everybody ran over to the east side of the plane, Gordon said Tuesday, and all of a sudden there it was in the clouds.
All told, she shot 12 seconds of footage of the shuttle arcing on its simple stream of smoke into space. She also shot three still photographs.
Link to video and pictures: http://news.yahoo.com/video/local-15749667/25265766#video=25265766
