Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Holtville February 2015 launch report

OK so that was another epic launch at the Holtville.  Zero wind, cool peeps, and hawt flyin' akshun!

I'm psyched that Frank Hermes made an appearance to inadvertently, if viciously, topple my GoPro with his clustered liftoff and perfect flight and recovery.  Thanks a bunch, Frank!  Darrel flew his J595 successfully and it too, was awesome.  Finally Ron Rickwald flew a roaring M1315 in his Armageddon and good times were had by all.  I posted my photos here and, if Google lamely redirects you to Google+, look for the thumbnail of the white arrow on the green background.
     I had only two flights but both were on new motors from CTI. The first was my Polecat Aerospace 4" V2 on a Pro54/2G 699J145 Skidmark moonburner for an astonishingly stable liftoff and ascent on this long-burn beast of a Skidmark:

This motor ships with a 19 second delay but my 54mm delay adjustment tool only goes to -10 seconds.  The shortest possible delay would be quite long for many rockets so... what up wid dat, Cesaroni?  I adjusted to ~10.5 seconds and that was perhaps about 1 second too long but still ejected within the apogee window.  Once again, without any wind, it felt like I walked a mile but let's check the geotag on my cell photo... and, in doing so, I discovered a use for the Maps feature in Lightroom 5.x!! Any image with embedded GPS coordinates can be imported and reverse-geotagged using Lightroom's map (click to enlarge):

I'm sure there's some clever HTML5 method to allow you to click on regions of the above but I'll just quickly walk through the features and employ those antiquated yet familiar hyperlinks instead:
That's about all I got.  Fun review?

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