The now-famous image of the Columbia just before it broke apart was taken, as it turns out, with a ten-year-old Macintosh and a toy telescope.
Instead, it was taken by Starfire Optical Range engineers who, in their free time, had rigged up a device using a commercially available 31/2-inch telescope and an 11-year-old Macintosh computer, the researchers said.
"We were not asked by NASA to do this," said Robert Fugate, the optical range's technical director. "There was no official project or tasking to do this. The people who work here are geeks. This was an opportunity to look at a rapidly moving object and try to take a picture of it. That's really all it was."
(Thanks, Larry and everyone else!)
