Rare film of the 1986 Challenger explosion, taken by Jeffrey Ault of Orange City, Fla., and licensed by the Huffington Post has emerged. It is perhaps the only amateur recording of the event on film, and online it has been made available exclusively to The Huffington Post.

Jeffrey Ault built a 5-foot tall replica of an Apollo-era Saturn V rocket for an elementary school science project. In high school, when NASA was conducting tests of the space shuttle program, he routinely wrote to the space administration requesting mission reports, collecting them in a file that he still has to this day.

So when he had the opportunity to attend the launch of the Challenger space shuttle while visiting Florida in January 1986, he was thrilled.

Ault, who was 19 at the time and visiting from southern California, attended the launch with his parents, Bernice and Robert, and his friend Bill Graber. He filmed the event with his Chinon Super 8 film camera while Graber snapped photos.

Like many home movies, the film sat untouched in a box in Ault's house for decades. Until last week, it had been 26 years since he had seen the film, which The Huffington Post licensed from Ault.