Light Painting

My rocket shoots the moon

This is a fun one to decode….with surprising splashes of color going a half-mile up(and no Photoshop as always)

I envisioned the “Shoot the Moon” perspective during the day and suggested it to the WIRED photographer. We had our tripod legs enmeshed, and I hope they got something similar.

heh… Night shots allow for wonderful a time-lapse of rocketry events… I launched a modified version of my night rocket…

Camera Settings

Propellant Details

This BSD Diab-Glo “survived” a lawn dart into the playa last year, and now with a new nose cone, avionics bay, and extra spotlights to light up the parachute, it has a total of 24 multicolor LEDs blinking in manic patterns….

This time, the Aerotech Green Mojave propellant burned brightly, lighting up the playa and the neighboring launch rails, but it also burned through the center of the forward closure (melting aluminum) and torched the electronics of the bottom section… and even burnt right through the “fire-proof” kevlar that was holding the top and bottom half of the rocket together. So the two sections separate mid-way and both are unstable. The motor without nose goes into a corkscrew and then fades to darkness. The nose cone, luckily, is still connected to the HCX flight computer which operates like a charm and detects apogee and pops the chute as programmed (there is a fire-block between the bottom and top half, so the upper half is in perfect shape and will be reused). Near apogee, there is some white smearing as the parachute deploys with spotlights illuminating it.

Then the nosecone and avionics bay drift back to the playa (to the left) at a fairly constant speed, so the blinking light pattern makes a spiral candycane in the sky.

P.S. Moments earlier, we saw the ISS streaking overhead like an orbiting bright asteroid.

Camera Settings

14 seconds, f2.8, 16mm, ISO 800 Canon 5D, bulb mode, manual focus done earlier when the sun was still up… and the horizon could still be seen and made level. I knew where the moon would rise (roughly) from the prior night. So I left my tripod there for a few hours until it got dark enough. Single digital exposure, no Photoshop.

The shot comes from luck, and lots of practice… and knowing the subject’s behavior from many prior encounters…. =)

I held it open in bulb mode with manual focus and went with my gut on the settings. The first shot was way overexposed. And the next two took my breath away. I like this one the most; it was the third of the bunch, and I was trying to use the red moon to light up the scattered clouds a bit more… and I had the rare benefit (photographically speaking =) that my rocket motor ruptured mid flight !

Here’s my favorite shot from the same event last year (the sky was perfectly clear):

Propellant Details

The green propellant has various grains that burn orange. You can see them clearly in this flawless launch:

I was reminded at how tough this little rocket is. Last time, it lawn darted into the desert playa but only lost the nose cone. That is quite a ballistic impact into hard clay. You can see those photos at the bottom of my EMRR rocket review. I built a new nose cone and added an avionics bay section for a flight computer. Luckily the nose and bay survived this launch, and only the bottom half burned out. I have just finished a fiberglass Nike Smoke rocket that can provide a new bottom half for night launches. We can rebuild her… We can make her stronger and blinkier than before…