Stabilized Footage of Falcon Heavy From Launch to Landing

That is some crazy stabilization. Great footage of the landing.

Last Edited by PatriotGeorge on 01/24/2023 07:43 AM

Wow!

That was really good footage.
I had a Skywatcher 300 with a HEQ5 goto mount and used to take astro images but it wasn't fast enough to track anything like this

Incredible

thanks for the share

Freaken Awesome... as always. Thanks!

Outstanding!

What ever happened to plasma propulsion?

Thanks for getting it stabilized, Doc!

Of course Trinity (or some sycophant) has my work IP currently banned. And there’s no way I was going to watch this on my phone. So I went directly to your Astronomy Live channel and watched it. You should get an award for this footage! The side booster separation, velocity slowdown to a stop, and then the backtracking is by far the best footage I have seen of the Falcon Heavy launches.

Interestingly, the next video that started was from Marcus House. He has your pre-stabilized footage of that in his video. I wish he knew about this video.

BTW-what software did you finally use to get this done?

Why would some butt hurt retards one star this?!

Damn, get over yourselves.

I could watch spacex rockets all day

Wonder if these could make a new updated version of the space shuttle more practical.

The guy who did the stabilization is linked in the description and in a pinned comment, he goes by the "French Space Guy" on the English version of his channel. He made some custom software which used a posteriori stabilization method to stabilize the footage. It was very computationally expensive and took days to do. I don't have the software myself, I gave him the footage to stabilize for me.

VASIMR requires a huge amount of electrical power.
[link to en.wikipedia.org (secure)]
It would consume pretty much all of the electrical power of ISS in order to generate only 5 Newtons of thrust. That's 1/10th of what one these little thrusters will do:
[link to www.ecaps.space (secure)]
Of course, VASIMR would use the reaction mass much more efficiently than that little chemical thruster, and that's the advantage of it. You get more bang for the amount of fuel you have, similar to an ion thruster, but capable of more thrust than an ion thruster. The problem is that in order to deliver enough thrust to actually shorten the travel time to Mars for a mission carrying people, it needs a huge amount of power. Like, you better be bringing a nuclear reactor. And if you're bringing a nuclear reactor, you better have very good radiators to reject all that waste heat from the massive amount of power you're generating.

Very cool, thank you.

I love how the body of the boosters go from dark to red to white on ascent and white to red to dark on decent due to the sunset/dusk launch.

Great footage.

A third of GLP thinks these rocket landings are fake. Another 10% is on the fence about it. Only about 60% are confident that it's real.
Thread: Last Night's Supposed Falcon Heavy "Booster Landing"
The numbers of doubters are going up over time. Only about 5 years ago it used to be that about 77% thought it was real.
Thread: Air Force X-37B Set to Launch on a Falcon 9 Tomorrow

I've given up trying to convince people. We live in a post-truth society. The truth doesn't matter. This is a perfect example of it; SpaceX is launching more and more frequently, Falcon Heavy, OneWeb and Transporter launches will continue to provide opportunities to see LZ-1/LZ-2 landings that anyone can see these for themselves in person. It doesn't matter, people will choose to believe it's fake anyway, even when a simple plane ride is all that sits between them and first hand knowledge that this is real.

The only question is why, what's driving the increasing disbelief, even in the face of an overwhelming and increasing body of evidence that it's real from independent amateurs like me? It is my hypothesis that this disbelief is not driven by evidence at all, so evidence does not matter at all.

There are multiple factors at play, all of them aligned to increase the level of disbelief. One is an ever-increasing rejection of authority. SpaceX is seen as just a public front for NASA, so they are an "authority" to be rejected and disbelieved. Another factor is Elon Musk himself. He was for years a hero for the political left in the US, popularizer of electric cars, immigrant, major donor, etc. Now he's seen as too pro-free speech and too anti-vax by the left (remember when the left was anti-vax just before the vax came out because Trump was still president? Yeah that lasted about 5 seconds until the election was over - ideology drives belief, not evidence!), and he's a complete villain to them. At the same time, his acceptance by people on the right is not all-encompassing. Just because he has been rejected by the left does not automatically make him a hero to those who already wrote him off as a scam artist and hoaxer.

Someone who thought his rockets were fake in 2017 when he was a golden boy of the left will not suddenly accept that they're real in 2023 just because he is now seen by the left as being too pro-free speech and too anti-vax. So he did nothing to gain new believers by changing his polarizing image from one side of the political aisle to the other. He may have gained some new support politically by those who see him as an opportunity to capitalize on the situation, but those who were already actively polarized against him before are still distrusting of him now, at best. At worst, they're still the ones screaming this is all fake, only now some who were previously fan boys no longer come to his defense.

You can see evidence for this all over GLP, with people saying he's just following a script, that he's controlled opposition now, etc. These are some of the people who already believed these rocket landings were fake. Only now he's lost the support of some who were his original base. Not all, but some on the left have stopped supporting him. That means the equilibrium has shifted. His critics are still his critics and his supporters are not as numerous as they were before. The "space is fake and not hetero" mantra is popular in edgy online spaces, there are entire communities built around memes to that effect. High school and college aged kids are more likely to fall into those communities. Being seen as an Elon fanboy is not hip in 2023 whereas it was more acceptable in 2017.

Nowhere in this equation does evidence matter. It does not matter that there are tons of videos like mine showing the booster landings are real. I was the first to film an unbroken shot from launch to landing in 2018, but I am not the only person to have done it since then. There are others who have since replicated the feat. It doesn't matter. It doesn't even matter that anyone can see it for themselves here in Florida or at times near Vandenberg in California. The cultural shift is what is driving it, and if you have evidence that they're wrong then you're just part of the conspiracy, or equally damning, you're a stupid homo nerd who should be shunned and avoided.

Last Edited by Astromut on 01/24/2023 11:03 AM

Thank you for another amazing and educational thread Mutt Your videos are as awesome as ever. As a fellow astronomer I want to hear your thoughts on the satellite pollution. Should we sue the launchers and halt the launches until they can make all sats totally invisible?

Last Edited by Snuffielover on 01/24/2023 11:14 AM

GLP in the last decade has transformed from a fringe topic forum to a significant alt-right news source due to the radical left/super wealthy/NWO take over of DC and MSM.

As this has happened, they have sought to discredit sites like GLP with tactics like flat earth, Nazi style antisemitism, etc.

Astro's work on GLP and YT astronomy live gives substantial credibility to this site and counteracts their tactics. Astro on both sites is clearly targeted.


Sad, but this is the America we now live in.

No, I don't think that's a sensible option. I do like that SpaceX seems to be taking concrete steps to mitigate their impact as much as practically possible though. What I would want to see is that these standards are applied across the board. Starlink is not the only mega constellation going up. What is the situation with OneWeb, for example?
[link to beta.nsf.gov (secure)]

Nice!

Yeah, OneWeb, then there was this other satellite that has outdone even Iridium with huge square (5G antennas to fry your brains with) :D That lights up like the second sun int he sky. I've had so many astroimages ruined by those pesky trails. It's like they don't want us to image the sky anymore.

PS! Astro, I've got a timelapse video somewhere where I see lines of dots which look like sats, which are stationary. As five and five light up and fade in a sequence over the sky over multiple hours. No idea what that is and can't seem to find the images now. Looking very strange. Wondered what those could be.

Sounds like maybe geostationary sats near the anti-solar point but just outside earth's shadow glinting off the sun.

Oh wow, thank you for the explanation. :)

Whatever it was it was pretty for sure. Thanks Astro, hope to share good images as soon as we get some sky over here. Been a very abnormally cloudy winter.

Fantastic! Thank you so much for all your great space footage of different kinds.

9 minutes well spent. Thanks very much for sharing something really rather brilliant.

ThetaTV has an official partnership and TV channel with NASA:
[link to www.theta.tv (secure)]





Last Edited by Butch DeFeo on 01/24/2023 05:01 PM

I doubt that very much. NASA TV is free to stream, anyone can grab it and re-host it for free. You can watch it on YouTube as well.