Photo Of The Day

The final space shuttle launch made a spectacular arc across the sky in photos taken from the edge of space by a student balloon project.

From an altitude of more than 89,000 feet (27,000 meters), the balloon took photos of NASA's shuttle Atlantis making the final liftoff of the space shuttle program. Atlantis blasted off on Friday (July 8) from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The balloon, nicknamed StratoShuttle-1, is a project of the California-based Quest for Stars. The organization lets students help loft balloon-borne experimentsto the edge of space using relatively cheap, off-the-shelf hardware.