'No guts, no glory': How I captured NASA's Roman Space Telescope cross the sun on a picture-perfect SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch

The SpaceX Falcon Heavy carrying NASA's Roman Space Telescope crosses the face o the sun as it launches to space from Pad 39A of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in this photo taken by Space.com's Josh Dinner from a Titusville Hobby Lobby parking lot.

Here's how he did it. (Image credit: Space.com / Josh Dinner) CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Standing in the parking lot of the Titusville Hobby Lobby was maybe something I should have planned on before traveling to Florida for the launch of NASA's Nancy Roman Grace Space Telescope, but it was not where I expected to be until I was speeding there in my car.

Rocket enthusiasts and locals around Florida's Space Coast gathered Sunday morning (Aug.

30) to watch SpaceX's latest Falcon Heavy launch.

The triple-booster rocket launched NASA's newest flagship observatory , the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is now on its way to an orbital sweet spot nearly 1 million miles from Earth to image the widest views of the universe ever captured, map planets around alien stars and usher in a new wave of discovery into phenomena like dark matter and dark energy .

Liftoff occurred at 07:26:49 a.m.

EDT (11:26:49 GMT), from Launch Complex-39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC).

Specifying those 49 seconds was very important.

Roman's launch opportunity is known as an "instantaneous" launch window because its proper orbital delivery was dependent on getting the time right down to the very second.

And the seconds mattered for those watching the launch, too.

Any fewer, and the clouds from viewing the location of dozens of photographers at Hobby Lobby, myself included, wouldn't have cleared in time.

Any more and the sun would have moved too high in the sky to capture what me and all those photographers were hoping to capture.

The early morning launch got off the ground a little more than 20 minutes after sunrise, while the bright glowing orb was still relatively low in the sky.

The Space Coast's eastward shores on the Atlantic Ocean, coincidentally, sometimes offer the rare alignment with one of the missions launching from KSC for a rocket to fly right in front of the sun on its way to space, but only from specific vantage points.