Surprisingly (I thought the desert was more dry) we had some clouds, a bit of rain, a few lightning bolts, and even a brief power outage. (When this sort of thing happened about ten days ago we never lost power even though there was an outage all over town – I figured our solar power panels had kept us online. Maybe? Maybe today there was heavy enough cloud cover so that the solar system wasn’t producing enough to cover us? I don’t know. It’s yet another learning curve.)
That was all well and good, but tonight SpaceX was launching another Falcon 9 out of Vandenberg. Having clouds covering a big chunk of the sky to the west is a problem.
Being as far away from the coast & launch as we are, the rocket never gets very high above the horizon to begin with. With clouds out there, I was lucky to see the rocket pop out through a hole in the overcast for three or four seconds just before MECO, at which point it went behind all of those clouds in the upper left and was never seen again. (The launch was perfectly fine and successful, I just didn’t see any more of it.)
Afterward, the quarter moon behind the clouds looked spooky and beautiful.
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 