Shuttle photos bring instant fame to tweeter

(Click on the photo to see it full size on Stefanie Gordon's twitpic page.)

Stefanie Gordon was napping on her Delta flight from New York to West Palm Beach when the captain announced that passengers could see the space shuttle if they looked out their windows.

Using her iPhone, Gordon snapped three images of Endeavour emerging from the cloud cover. She posted the photos on Twitpic and sent a tweet to her 1,800 or so followers on Twitter. The photos instantly went viral.

By the end of the evening, Gordon, who uses @Stefmara as her Twitter name, had well over 3,700 followers. Her photo had been retweeted thousands of times and shared on websites around the globe.

CBS and NBC had called for interviews. The St. Petersburg Times and Washington Post contacted her for permission to print her photo.

"I cannot keep up with all the RTs and tweets,'' Gordon tweeted later in the day. "This is crazy. Guess it's a good thing I woke up on my flight!"

Gordon, of Hoboken, N.J., is using her newfound fame to look for a job in event planning, preferably sports-related. She tweeted that she is a fan of the Yankees, Rangers, Giants and the USF Bulls.

And why was she coming to Florida? For her mother's birthday, she tweeted.

Read about how the St. Petersburg Times found Stefanie Gordon and obtained the photo to run on the front page.