Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you.
Posted on 09/27/2025 1:19:56 PM PDT by MtnClimber
Explanation: On the morning of September 24 a rocket crosses the bright solar disk in this long range telescopic snapshot captured from Orlando, Florida. That's about 50 miles north of its Kennedy Space Center launch site. This rocket carried three new space weather missions to space. Signals have now been successfully acquired from all three - NASA's Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, NASA’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Space Weather Follow-On Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1) - as they begin their journey to L1, an Earth-Sun lagrange point. L1 is about 1.5 million kilometers in the sunward direction from planet Earth. Appropriately, major space weather influencers, aka dark sunspots in active regions across the Sun, are posing with the transiting rocket. In fact, large active region AR4225 is just right of the rocket's nose.
|
|
Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
For more detail go to the link and click on the image for a high definition image. You can then move the magnifying glass cursor then click to zoom in and click again to zoom out. When zoomed in you can scan by moving the side bars on the bottom and right side of the image.
🪐 🌟 🌌 🍔
Orlando is 50 miles north of Kennedy Space Center? For people who are not government climate scientists I think that would be west.
Wow.
Wow, that’s cool and amazing. At that magnification, the photographer was using a tracker to track the sun as it would leave the field of view in mere seconds.
But how could he know that just that instant the rocket would be in view of the sun? Did the rocket blast off within milliseconds of its scheduled lift off?
Pretty cool once-in-a-lifetime shot for the photographer!
Orbital launches are so routine now.
Being an olde farte, I dimly recall when launching anything into orbit was a big deal.
Wonderful!
By the way, the Falcon 9 first stage returned and landed on an ocean platform. It will be refurbished and launched again. Some of the Falcon 9 first stages have been reused 20 and 30 times.
Speaking of reusability, at the very top of the rocket is a two-piece, clamshell-shaped nose cone, called a fairing, that protects a rocket’s payload during its journey through the atmosphere. After the rocket has left the denser parts of the atmosphere, the fairing separates into two halves and SpaceX also retrieves AND reuses the fairings.
I take it that one of those tiny dots is Earth?
It's too bad he didn't describe more technical detail about how to point the camera, track the sun, know when the rocket would transit the sun, etc.
pf.photography__
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket transits the Sun, captured from over 50 miles away in Orlando, Florida.
The rocket carried the NASA IMAP, NOAA SWFO-L1, and Carruthera Geocorona Observatory Missions into space. The missions will be exploring the sun and space weather.
There were some clouds in the way, and I wasn't sure if they would clear in time for the transit, but they luckily cleared out about a minute before launch.
Using a solar filter helped to capture the definition of active sunspots on the Sun, with the Falcon 9 flying just to the left of active region 4225.
🚀: SpaceX Falcon 9
🗓️: September 24, 20205, 0731 EST
📷: Nikon D850, NIKKOR 100-500mm, 500mm, f/5.6, 1/1000 sec, ISO 250, K&F Concept 95mm ND100000(16.6 Stops) ND Lens, 3 Legged Thing Winston 2.0, Think Tank Airport 30L (a rolling camera bag)
📽️: 81 shots. I lost the rocket in the sunlight just before the transit started, so there was a slight delay on the trigger at the beginning of the transit.
I remember watching the first Saturn V launch on TV, then hearing the rumble outside and rushing out to see it LIVE.
I was in Jacksonville, 125 miles away from Cape Kennedy!
“three new space weather missions to space”
Space weather? I thought we had a pretty good idea what the weather is in space.
Those shots are always cool, like airplanes crossing the Sun or Moon, or even more impressive are the videos taken thru telescopes of the ISS crossing the Sun, Moon, or just following it crossing the sky. Amazing stuff.
There is no direction in space. lol
They are incredible.
I can see the orbital mechanics of a satellite transition g the sun or moon being very predictable so you can plan the photo. But the variability of the timing of a rocket launch? Not only the timing, but knowing the precise location for the shot! That must be far harder than two orbiting bodies.
I was born in 55, so I remember launches being a big deal, too!!
I totally agree. There is luck involved in a shot like that.i can see the ISS every so often, that’s about it.
Maybe I missed it, but it appears that NASA did not mention that it was a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket... TF?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.