I’ve often said that if you don’t look, you won’t see.
For the second time in 4 days, I’ve seen something that I’d never seen before, and I spend a lot of time outside at night. In this case, it was a Chinese Long March 6C rocket (presumably) venting propellants into low-earth orbit (LEO), after having launched an unspecified payload from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center (launched on 5/7/24 at 2121 hrs MDT). This was the first launch of a new variant of the Long March 6 that uses kerosene and LOX as propellant, and virtually no payload information was released. Recently China confirmed four satellites onboard the ‘carpool’ mission; at least one satellite was to be placed into a sun-synchronous orbit.
As on Thursday’s observation of Falcon 9, I was in the middle of shooting when a large plume quickly appeared in the night sky, so again I wheeled the camera around and started capturing it. The plume looked blue-greyish to my eye, and spanned 40° in height and probably the same in width. In about 8 minutes, it had disappeared into the northern horizon. I only found out this morning upon returning home that the timelapse I was shooting with a 14mm lens also captured a second pass of the rocket and plume, 90 minutes later! The initial pass could be seen from the Central U.S. around 2240 hrs MDT.
The rocket comes into view at 0:02 seconds into the time-lapse video below (captured with a 14mm lens, centered on Polaris), and the second pass at 0:11 seconds. I’ve used a stacking technique that ‘ghosts’ each image for a few frames, allowing the tracks to be seen easier (StarStax ‘comet’ mode). It’s become evident to me after staring at this data that there must have been two (or more) venting cycles, as on the second pass you can see a separate plume that follows the main plume into the frame (bottom left). Also, there are two small ‘satellites’ of the main rocket booster that can be seen in closeup views of images, presumably two of the ‘carpool’ payloads that were to be released into low-earth orbit.
Although I love the movie “Don’t Look Up” for many reasons, I encourage you to do so, especially at night, because you just never know what you might see!
Two ‘satellites’ of the main rocket body, likely released payloads:
