Canon EOS 350D DIGITAL
ƒ/3.5
10 mm
1/0
400

The original burning man.

My evenings are punctuated with preparation of various rockets for the Black Rock Desert launches later this month. Night launches with LED sequencers on board, video rockets and a bigger V2 – weighing in at 100lbs so far… and I still need to add three parachutes and two flight computers. First flight will with an Animal Motor Works N2801 spewing a shower of titanium sparklers.

Met today with a colleague who has a system to accelerate his rocket from 0 to 600 MPH in 0.25 seconds. Getting the electronics and even the propellant grains to survive over 400 g’s is a challenge!

This looks like the best of the NASA shots, but it is by Nils from Sweden, posted with permission.

(P.S. I don’t have access to my photos right now. Upgrading to Snow Leopard corrupted my hard drive, irreperably. Slowly recovering everything. Almost as bad as a Microsoft OS… I suspected a X.0 install on a near-full HDD, so I backed up everything right before; nevertheless, iPhoto will not open)

91 responses to “Icarus at Night”

  1. Shamagu Avatar
    Shamagu

    This photo is just great, Steve. Very interesting about achieving 400 g.

    Sorry about Snow Leopard, will be doing the same this weekend (definitely after full backup).

    Reply
  2. Lloyd K. Barnes Photography Avatar
    Lloyd K. Barnes Photography

    Hi, I’m an admin for a group called Beautiful Light – One a Day, and we’d love to have this added to the group!

    Wow cool shot! My Snow Leopard install (from Leopard) went smoothly.

    Reply
  3. Happy Tinfoil Cat Avatar
    Happy Tinfoil Cat

    Art

    Reply
  4. jewast Avatar
    jewast

    Awesome shot!

    Reply
  5. moisesdiaz Avatar
    moisesdiaz

    Awesome!!!

    Reply
  6. Guido Robino Avatar
    Guido Robino

    really impressive, this shot perfectly describes the power of the rocket, just palm trees and the ground are a little blurred but they don’t affect the final result and they give to the picture a dinamic aspect, very cool shot!

    Reply
  7. biotron Avatar
    biotron

    sorry to hear about your data – good luck with recovery

    Reply
  8. david.orban Avatar
    david.orban

    Steve,

    is the ‘All Rights Reserved’ tag on this photo correct? All the others are CC-BY, aren’t they? Maybe because of the unusual upload you made it hasn’t be set the way you wanted.

    (Just a headsup as I wanted to use it in one of my presentations (you are a constant source for images in my slides! See slideshare.com/davidorban ))

    Reply
  9. thepretenda Avatar
    thepretenda

    love love love love lovel ovelovel oveleovvelovgoelovelevoelvoelvoelvoelvoeleoveloe it!!!!!

    Reply
  10. Head_First_Only Avatar
    Head_First_Only

    What the pretenda said. Absolutely beautiful.

    Reply
  11. NYCandre Avatar
    NYCandre

    400g’s .. hmm . anyone knows off the top of his (her) head what is the g’s of a standard .38 bullet ?

    Re: upgrade issues .. after N mishaps I now use a cloned hard drive (they are really cheap these days) to do major upgrades – thataway no sweat if I need to go back – hardware is 180% more reliable than software kludges 😉

    Reply
  12. Dabbler Avatar
    Dabbler

    fantastic shot! fascinating commentary!

    one of the tricks to OS X upgrades, besides full backup, is to do a permissions repair and a disk verify.

    Reply
  13. A.al-Muzaini Avatar
    A.al-Muzaini

    Amazing !?

    Reply
  14. www.bazpics.com Avatar
    www.bazpics.com

    Bwah, stunning shot!!!
    —
    Seen in the interestingness archives. ( ?² )

    Reply
  15. Duncan Rawlinson - Duncan.co Avatar
    Duncan Rawlinson – Duncan.co

    Great photo. Too bad about the corrupted data.

    I usually run carbon copy cloner on an external drive and then do a clean install on every major osx update and import stuff manually. It’s a good excuse to clean digital house too…

    *runs off and does a backup

    Reply
  16. restlessthought Avatar
    restlessthought

    touch the sky! …stunning shot

    Reply
  17. ideastoday Avatar
    ideastoday

    Love it. Good luck with your data.

    Reply
  18. PerpetualCandle Avatar
    PerpetualCandle

    Fantastic shot!

    Reply
  19. Ray Parnova Avatar
    Ray Parnova

    that’s great!

    Reply
  20. todd- Avatar
    todd-

    so cool

    Reply
  21. -sina- Avatar
    -sina-

    Excellent work!

    Reply
  22. Oscar Sanchez Montaner Avatar
    Oscar Sanchez Montaner

    Wow… fantastic!!!

    Reply
  23. Emîly Avatar
    Emîly

    This is a good picture, at first I thought it was a tornado.

    Reply
  24. christophandre Avatar
    christophandre

    great shot!!!

    Reply
  25. NYCandre Avatar
    NYCandre

    Alright – curiosity got the better of me .. from public data Beretta 5" barrel has muzzle velocity of 335 m/s means 44,000 m/s**2 or about 440 g’s

    So, yeah this 400g acceleration is about the same as that of a 9mm Beretta. Of course that’s average acceleration (never studied shock mechanics but that looks like ballpark same)

    Reply
  26. jeancem1 Avatar
    jeancem1

    Very impressive!

    Reply
  27. heet_myser Avatar
    heet_myser

    I’m always a little in awe when I hear people use iPhoto. Kinda like when I get an e-mail from an aol.com address. 😉

    Reply
  28. ON THE MOON STUDIO Avatar
    ON THE MOON STUDIO

    A1 shot

    Reply
  29. ☼ www.skopelos.net Avatar
    ☼ www.skopelos.net

    Terrific shot ! seen in Explore / Interestingness.

    Reply
  30. Bobby Haws (kids) Avatar
    Bobby Haws (kids)

    Amazing!!!

    Reply
  31. WIERCIPIETAS Avatar
    WIERCIPIETAS

    I love this!!!Great shot!!! Bravo!!!

    Reply
  32. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    venettaj: Oh, the rocketeers have a different burn…

    Conflagrate Coming In Hot - 2

    heet: iPhoto has everything I need… well, except Photomatix for HDR merges…

    NYC.andre: an apt comparison, but closer in size to a howitzer.

    The OS recovery continues… Music and email are mostly back. iPhoto can’t print or order books because there are "no themes available." Looks like a long standing problem, with no easy fixes. Anyone know of a Snow Leopard-specific help page on this?

    Reply
  33. cluttered sofa Avatar
    cluttered sofa

    amazing capture, seen on the explore. Congratulations.

    Reply
  34. Itim may Avatar
    Itim may

    muito bom

    Reply
  35. r.AI (-) Avatar
    r.AI (-)

    Amazing shot! Even if it’s your friends… Sorry to hear you got snowed, makes me feel wise for resisting progress.

    Reply
  36. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    So I upgraded another Mac, and all seemed fine, so I tried a third. And we had a power outage midway! Sure enough, everything is hosed. Even to the point that I can’t erase the HD with the original install disk or the upgrade disk. I wonder if a hacker could write malicious code this powerful?

    A veritable Snow Crash…

    Oh, and this photo is the perfect complement to my launch of Icarus by day:

    Icarus

    Ah, the hubris of trying to jerry rig a three stage Estes rocket…

    Reply
  37. © KristoforG Avatar
    © KristoforG

    super cool

    Reply
  38. In Memoriam: jerryfi_99 Avatar
    In Memoriam: jerryfi_99

    Cool shot(s). I figure there’s a FS of 2 buried in there. ?;-) I think? 1000mph in 0.25sec looks like about 210g, taking about 210 ft to reach Vf. But my slide rule hasn’t been calibrated in a while, and the batteries are low. And I assumed constant acceleration, which is probably not the case. AR mode off. That second shot reminds me of one I saw from White Sands a few years ago, of a deep ground penetrator. Now that saw some g. 8-o

    Reply
  39. Nejdet Duzen Avatar
    Nejdet Duzen


    I saw this in the 100+ Faves group and Faved it.

    Reply
  40. Alessandro Pischedda Avatar
    Alessandro Pischedda

    incredible…wonderful shot..

    Reply
  41. biotron Avatar
    biotron

    man, that is seriously bad luck…i feel sick just thinking about that happening to the last 3 months of my data…

    Reply
  42. John&Fish Avatar
    John&Fish


    I saw this in the 100+ Faves group and Faved it.

    Reply
  43. Tobi_2008 Avatar
    Tobi_2008


    I saw this in the 100+ Faves group and Faved it.
    —
    Seen next to a fellow photo of the group "100+ Faves 1-2-3 (Post one,Comment and Fave two)". ( ?² )

    Reply
  44. mewhitenoise Avatar
    mewhitenoise

    Fantastic shot, sorry to hear SL screwed your HD, mine updated fine (not that it helps!). Maybe your HD was on it’s way out, big accesses like that can do it sometimes?

    Reply
  45. Pieter D Avatar
    Pieter D

    Beautiful shot!

    Reply
  46. brash receipt Avatar
    brash receipt


    I saw this in the 100+ Faves group and Faved it.

    Reply
  47. www.facebook.com/AarSeePhotography Avatar
    www.facebook.com/AarSeePhotography

    awesome shot

    Reply
  48. enchanted wool Avatar
    enchanted wool

    wow !!!

    I saw this in the 50+ Faves group and Faved it.

    Reply
  49. belthelem Avatar
    belthelem

    Excellent picture!

    I saw this in the 100+ Faves group and Faved it.

    Reply
  50. luisjvs Avatar
    luisjvs

    Hi, I’m an admin for a group called A través de tu mirada (Post 1, comment 2), and we’d love to have this added to the group!

    Nos encantaria ver tu foto en el grupo

    we’d love to have your photo added to the group.
    “A través de tu mirada”

    Reply

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