File:Long Exposure at SpaceX LC-40 (19256701982).jpg

In my head, I imagined this photo working out much better than what you see. This was an attempt to get an hour of star trails at the SpaceX Launch Complex 40 with the (doomed, although we certainly didn’t know that) CRS7 Falcon9 rocket on the pad.

The biggest issue is of course, light. Although night remote camera set-ups seem to take place in the dark (flashlights are absolutely required) I never realized just how much light there is around the pad. Mike Howard and I were even discussing how dark the rocket would be. I started out thinking a 30 second exposure would work just fine, and upon seeing the rocket and all the lights around the pad, changed it to a 2 second exposure, which was still too long – the rocket is just a pillar of white, blown pixels.

With a shortened shutter speed, the image was now susceptible to capturing motion. There were a surprisingly high number of people hanging around at the south end of the camera field. Of note is the one member of the NASA Social group (who I thought were supposed to be at UCS-3) who paces around the area and then actually bumps into the running GoPro, causing half of the time-lapse images to be out of alignment. (I couldn’t believe it.)

(Full disclosure: that is actually me in the top right of the image – I’m always surprised by the field of view of the GoPro and obviously I wasn’t far enough to the side as I’m chatting with the security guard and dancing to avoid the millions of mosquitos. One actually flew in my mouth as I was standing there.)

I knew I needed to be as far south as possible (and looking north) for the shot, but I wasn’t able to avoid the moon. That’s the bright white line to the left of the rocket.

When I got on the bus, I looked at few images and wrote the thing off after seeing how washed out the images were, but when I ran the images through StarStax I was shocked that it was able to pick up as many stars as it did.