wrote:
Using these photos from NASA film camera E63 as a guide,

http://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v1p25.htm

would it be correct to assume that one should normally expect to see
nothing but clear sky in the locations where the yellow and red arrows
point here?

www.mission51l.com/art/UPIsmoke.jpg

I had included the following, orignally; but it got lost in the
shuffle, when Google's server kept giving me a 501 error.

The above UPI photo was published February 14, 1986, by the San
Francisco Chronicle. It appeared on the front page, with an article
which reads, in part:

"In the [NASA] photographs made public yesterday, the cloud appears
1.4 seconds after lift-off, but mysteriously does not show up in
pictures by the same camera about one second later."

It seems badly negligent to me that Rogers' Executive Summary makes no
effort to time-correlate or to caption by camera number its color
photos of lift-off smoke (several pictures from two cameras). One set
of photos was obviously cropped, so that the top of the FSS and other
helpful frames of reference are not available for correlation purposes.

If it is eventually shown that black lift-off smoke originated both
inboard and outboard of the right-aft ET/SRB attachment, that will be
consistent with flames both above and below said aft attachment, just
seconds before the explosion (as seen in near-horizontal flight).

Challenger's Ghost