Woke Up Early to a Visual Treat

This morning was an early morning for us; up about 5:20 for a 5:42 launch of this week's Falcon 9 Starlink launch, Starlink 5-14 from Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center.   Without a doubt, if you're going to come to this area - or go to Vandenberg Space Force Base, or any of the other handful of places on Earth where launches can be seen, you want to go for a launch that's about an hour before sunrise or an hour after sunset.  There's a window in those pre-sunrise or post-sunset launches where you get to see a phenomenon often called a Space Jellyfish.  We got a good one this morning.  

This morning's Jellyfish - although from a different perspective than we had because it was taken from far away from here.   As you can see by the lower right corner, photo by Fox channel 13, taken by Ryan French.  This Fox affiliate is in the Tampa area, and they include pictures people sent in from the area. 

What's happening here is that for the beginning of the flight, the rocket is in the night sky but it's also heading more easterly as it's heading upward, and the farther east it gets, the closer it gets to where the sun is above the horizon.  Sunrise here in the Silicon Swamp (most importantly, on the ground) was 6:38, four minutes short of an hour after the launch.  When the first stage was dropped, it still wasn't high enough or far enough east for the sun to be up, but within seconds, it popped into daylight.  

Most of what you're seeing in that picture is the rocket contrail from the second stage.  The brightest point in the cloud, on the left about a third of the way up, is the second stage engine.  We're looking up its exhaust plume.  At the lowest point in the cloud, there's a bright spot with what looks like a comet's tail: that's the first stage.  We could see the cold nitrogen thrusters in the first stage firing, letting out expanding circular clouds (probably spherical but we just see the outline).  I'm not sure what that object above and to the left of the booster is; it's possible it's a star or planet that was just in the line of sight.  It's possible it could have been one of the payload fairings.  From our yard, we saw the initial entry burn of about 20-30 seconds, but by that time, it was too low in the sky to keep seeing. 

I think the first time we saw one of these was just short of two years ago to the day, June 13, 2020, and I wrote about it.  That launch was 5:21 EDT and sunrise was 6:26, so the similarity of the geometry is remarkable.  

If you look around, you'll see photos of Space Jellyfish from hundreds of miles away from the launch site.  At the TV station's site, there are pictures taken from Tampa.  I saw one from Savannah, Georgia.  Which might have been closer to it than I was.