The Spitzer Space Telescope being sent on its way aboard a huge, hot Delta rocket, as a honeybee might have seen it.
When Spitzer launched Monday, 25 August 2003 at 1:35:39 a.m. EDT from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, members of the Spitzer team were poised two miles away with an infrared camera. At that distance, the Delta II Heavy rocket carrying Spitzer was barely a speck, but in the infrared, the heat in the rocket’s plume is extremely bright.