In the last press conference from the Columbia, Kalpana Chawla said interesting words (ok, not totally exactly what she said as the transmission wasn't perfect).
At the beginning of the flight, there was full moon (only seen when the Shuttle is in the shadow side of Earth, of course), and the shuttle was maneuvring at times.
She was at one point looking towards the back end and there was the Moon.

"If you were looking at the tail, the whole spaceship was glowing in the light from the Moon and you really felt that you were in a spaceship heading somewhere".

Raoul

(already have more than 30 hours of videos, while from liftoff to the fatal moment, I had only 5 minutes).