Last Thursday's Vandenberg Minuteman III missile test was seen from hundreds of miles presumably by tens of thousands (at a minimum) of people. It launched about 90 min. into the window at 7:36 PM. I was able to see it from Burbank (130 direct mi. from Vandenberg) and it was quite spectacular. I've seen several of these type launches so knew what to expect. Some stories on the web report that it was seen as far away as northern California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah and New Mexico. I wish there was a source on the web where those not able to see it could at least watch a video clip. I've been unable to find any video and most of the stills are of the swirled contrail after-effect which hung in the sky afterwards. It's a little frustrating that there seem to be no pictures of the actual launch itself except for one which I just found showing the latter part of the launch: http://www.freqofnature.com/ It's a pretty good picture taken perhaps 45 sec. (a guess) after the missile's liftoff. There were other interesting things happening before this picture was taken. It started as a point of light with a reddish contrail rising rapidly up from the horizon curving a little to the south. Then the contrail became white (hitting full sunlight) and then the plume gradually widens. There is what looks like an explosion of sorts (staging activity), then a bright point of light (as in the above pix) hangs almost motionless (looking down the tailpipe as the missile heads directly away from Los Angeles). After a number of seconds, the point of light disappears (stage burnout) and it's all over. All of this action is manifesting itself as a bright luminescent display caused by the backlighting of the sun below the horizon. You get a sense of this from the picture. Then, after the action is over, everybody and everybody's cousin gets their cameras and takes pictures of the lingering swirled contrail cloud which takes on some random shape and sometimes rainbow colors after hanging in the sky for several minutes. Many people did see the launch, usually by accident. One of my neighbors told how she was at a park with some young kids. They knew nothing about any launch happening. One of the kids saw it rise up from the horizon and alerted those nearby. They apparently saw it from close to the beginning because my neighbor asked me why the contrail changed from reddish to white. From my conversations and observations, I've noticed that some people will say they saw it, but when questioned more closely, it's apparent that they saw only the swirled contrail after-effect and not the actual launch. I've also noticed that although the local media might sometimes mention that there is to be a launch, I've never read, seen or heard any advance notice to the public that there might be an interesting, dynamic, and visually splendid show when the missile or rocket launches and details of time and such tend to be very general. The lingering swirled contrail after-effect is what is usually shown on the local and national TV news and on web sites. The local Ch-7 KABC had what appeared to be home video shot through a moving car window of the actual launch but they didn't show it in its entirety (or cut away and/or showed it out of sequence). It didn't do it justice and the quality wasn't so good. I have seen some high quality video (from TV broadcast) of this type launch in twilight effect conditions in the past and have recorded it on VHS for my archives. This time though, I have not seen any good video. I've also camcorded past launches on my somewhat cheap camcorder with not so much of a zoom to it, but did not do it this time. Anyway, here are some URL's of stories (some with swirled contrail after-effect pictures) of last Thursday's launch or in some cases pictures of swirled contrails from past launches. Google.com search of "vandenberg missile test" or similar descriptions got me to these URL's. http://www.freqofnature.com/photos/rocket/index.html Nice picture of swirled contrail after-effect and nice story too: http://www.msnbc.com/news/781470.asp http://www.bayarea.com/mld/bayarea/news/breaking_news/4111209.htm Brian Webb has some nice pictures at his web site of past launches generally from a closer perspective. Snapshot views from the Los Angeles area is more what I was looking for: http://home.earthlink.net/~kd6nrp/library.htm Nice site but nothing on the recent launch as of this writing but other pictures and descriptions from previous launches: http://schnapp.org/sky/sky_vandenberg.html -- Jake Rees ------------------------------------------- Introducing NetZero Long Distance Unlimited Long Distance only $29.95/ month! Sign Up Today! www.netzerolongdistance.com ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Sep 23 2002 - 07:02:41 EDT