My sister works at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. She has a lot of of contacts with astronomers. She received some interesting photos and information via email about the Columbia disaster: an astronomer caught some images from his observatory.
Please click on the "more..." link to read the astronomer's description and view the photos.
Here's the text of the email from astronomer John Sanford:
I attach 3 frames of stills from the digitalHi8 tape I shot from my
observatory here. Although low in the sky and a little foggy here, the
fireball was the brightest thing in the sky, rivalling Venus. I'll leave
it to NASA to decide if it was too bright, if you know what I mean.
The event I call a separation event started with a flash where the coma
brightened to about twice its diameter very instantly, and this happened
about 0554:34. Then within a second the bright object shown in the
stills detached and slowly fell behind the main body. The whole thing
left quite a luminous trail that lasted long enough for me to get an
image of it zoomed back. Not having seen a twilight reentry before, I
don't know if the prominence of the trail is important ot not. I had
been using about 15x on the tracked shot. There is a clock in the camera
and I calibrated it with my "atomic" wall clock (WWV) on Sunday. I doubt
if the drift was more than a tenth of second or less so NASA should be
able to get good timing off it. I may have been taping just when they
lost commo and data from the ship so that could be important.
About it from here. I hope they can get something useful from this...