Saturday, October 15, 2011

If I were 2.72 miles tall...

...the view might look something like this:

Here's the onboard video from my M1230 Imax flight this last Saturday at Roctober/Lucerne Dry Lake (best in 720p, full screen)(note the ill-fated desert beetle scaling the igniter just before the flame deluge):

This was my first solid, high-altitude Beeline GPS data set as plotted in Google Earth with a peak altitude of 14,434' AGL and recovery 0.8 miles S-SE from the pad:

It's interesting to note the the ARTS2 reported a peak barometric altitude of 13,915' and the Raven gave 13,925' for an average of 13,920'.  That's the closest I've ever seen two altimeters! (Only 0.07% disagreement).  I also passed mach 1 at about 3 seconds into the boost on the way to a peak of mach 1.15 or ~887MPH.  Here are links to the data images if you're interested:

Raven - tabular
Raven - graph
ARTS2 - tabular
ARTS2 - graph
ARTS2 - motor performance (M1230 -> M1374)
ARTS2 - coefficient of drag performance

Next up is that same rocket on an M840 White moonburner at Plaster Blaster 2011 from November 4-6.  We're hoping to pull together a drag race but approval is pending.  You should come check it out!

Update:  I forgot to include the cool liftoff shot by LL.  Unfortunately the full-size shot is significantly back-focused due to the lens sitting in the sun for awhile.  LL has razor sharp vision and manually focused about a half hour before the flight but even this smaller size rendering with significant sharpening is quite soft.   Not complaining... just explaining.  I recommend that you keep all your big lenses in the shade at all times if possible:

Update 2 (4/3/12) - I just found two more cell phone photos from this flight: the GPS tracking shot and recovery photo: