Unintentional Historical Display

Saturday night, the city of Tremonton, Utah, held a fireworks display. I decided to attend and try to photograph it… results were, on the whole, not spectacular. The regular lens had a good field of view, but not good light gathering power; the low-light lens actually had some spectacular shots, but I was too close for the fixed-zoom lens, and all the shots taken with it cropped the displays. Gah.

One thing I tried with some measure of success were long exposure shots with the regular lens zoomed way back for the maximum field of view. While the background vanished into darkness in most of the regular shots, in the long exposure shots the background shows up quite clearly. Like so:

As I was taking these shots, I noticed a satellite serenely cruising by. I had hoped that it would show up in the long exposures… and it did, crossing through a half dozen or so shots. You can see it in this closeup, just above the fireworks display:

So in one photo, we see two things:

1) Fireworks, the first practical application of rocket technology

2) A satellite, the latest practical application of rocket technology.