by Mark Wagner
On Thu, 4 Mar 1999, Akkana Peck wrote:
That was neat! I watched it from a south-facing conference room here at work. It was only a few minutes late, and right where the GIF image on the TAC page predicted it would be. The first stage burnout and second stage ignition were very obvious, and it was fun to watch the different shape of the smoke trail from the second stage (compared to the first) as it burned.Same here in Los Gatos. Pat and I walked around the corner where the street turns at a point where a hill falls away, so we were on a hilltop. Pat saw it first, asking what "that" was. I said "that's it"... and it streaked in a curved trajectory upward toward the east. The second stage was obvious.
When it hit sunlight, it changed from a small yellowish glow to a big blue haze, looking almost like a bright comet, and stayed that way for quite some time before finally fading out.
Here, it hit the sunlight and grew into a large circle, at first up to twenty degrees wide, with a blue glow in front, and a red streak and glow behind. With averted vision (it worked on this too), the size grew to over thirty degrees.
We watched for a while, hoping the glow would spread into streaks, but it didn't. Eventually, the rocket showed up again, low on the horizon heading out and down, eventually disappearing over the mountains.
Image *that* from a dark site! Way cool!
ps - I bet the people driving by us though we were nuts.