Night Launch

In December an Altas rocket was launched from the west coast (Vandenburg?) at 2am. This series of pictures were taken by D. Bishop from his home 100 miles away in the high California desert. He was kind enough to post them on the Rec.Models.Rockets binaries newsgroup.

The fuzzy sky that the rocket trail eventually disappears into is the light pollution of the Los Angeles light dome.

Details, in his words:

I was using my Topcon Super D 35mm SLR film camera on a tripod holding the shutter button down with it set on "B", I was only using asa 100 film, and that would not have captured enough to realy show. The whole flight, from first liftoff light to where it was getting lost in the L.A. light dome (I hate that) took up the first 8 mins (about) as it was heading southwest away from me towards orbit. By the time I got inside my trailer out of the cold, it was already over India.

For each shot I was doing a mental count releasing the button at or about the count of 20.

As usual, the pictures are in the extended entry. There are seven photos, but each is rather small, so this isn't a huge bandwidth killer.

Posted by Ted at January 13, 2004 05:20 AM | TrackBack