Firefly

I’ve gone off at length about the joy of seeing hundreds if not thousands of fireflies in the woods out behind the Hartness House every night when we were in Vermont. We don’t have fireflies in SoCal – except for one big one tonight.

Named more for the SF series and movie, this was the 5th launch of the Alpha launch vehicle from Firefly Aerospace. You can see the orangish trail coming up behind the palm trees on the right, lit by the Sun somewhere far over the western horizon, while above the telephone pole on the left you can see the second stage heading south to orbit (it got there successfully!) with the just separated first stage falling back behind it, venting excess fuel.

Up close, the “V”-shaped exhaust from the second stage is clearly seen as it heads uphill, while the first stage is at the center of that “butterfly” of gas behind it. One or both of the two small dots might be fairing halves that were jettosined to save weight after the rocket got out of the atmosphere.

Not perfectly seen here, but we got a decent “jellyfish” effect from the exhaust plume expanding and glowing in the sunlight in the dark sky after sunset.

This launch looked different from the SpaceX launches we see once a week or so now. The SpaceX Falcon 9 is a much bigger rocket with more engines and exhaust, but this was a nice launch to see, very pretty! Congratulations