Missile Test Creates Huge Expanding Halo of Light Over Hawaii
The Bad Astronomer writes "A Minuteman III missile launch from California early Wednesday morning created a weird, expanding halo of light seen from the CFHT observatory on Hawaii's Mauna Kea. The third stage of the missile has ports that open and dump fuel into the near-vacuum. This cloud expands rapidly as a spherical shell, shock-exciting the air molecules and causing them to glow, creating the bizarre effect."
I thought they outlawed above ground nuclear testing decades ago. This is a pretty obvious cover up of a small nuke and I doubt this would fool anyone.
Now the United States will finally be able to fight off it's number 1 threat. Vampires.
I've seen Stargate. I know this is just another lame government cover up of an alien visitation. Better check on your cows!!
Agile Artisans
Any bets that this is the same exercise as the launch we didn't do back in April? We wouldn't want to have North Korea have a hissy fit or anything.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
North Korea's about to follow. They've got their best Photoshop team on the job right now!
Why do they need to test a Minuteman III ?
Its not a new weapon, they have been operational for around over 40 years
Cue conspiracy theories about alien technology and/or chemtrails in 3... 2... 1...
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Its a solid rocket.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
In LA in the late 80s. I thought aliens were invading. The sun had set but still illuminated the upper atmosphere, where a strangely large greenish globe of glowing gas gently expanded while a small bright object traveled remarkably slowly through its center. People had stopped and were watching as alertly as I was -- seriously, it was one of those slightly spine-tingling moments when you believe something impossible and possibly very bad might be happening... The next day the newspaper had a short piece about a launch from Vandenberg causing it. Or so they say...
The lens flare does not lie!
Similar phenomena have been are common from missile launches from Vandenberg Airforce Base in Southern California, and I would expect them to be seen from Cape Canaveral. I've seen dozens in Southern Calif. dating back to the early 1960's. Generally they would be seen from launches around sunset or after. The trajectory is toward the Pacific in the west, for reasons of safety--not shooting over inhabited areas inland, or physics, involving the earths rotation? The sun over the horizon would light them up against a darkening sky. The trails/plume IFIC could be hundreds or even thousands of miles away and high up.
Sometimes you could see the rocket as a bright spot, not as bright as the brightest stars but mag 1or 3, not as point sourced, and the brightest variable. I've tracked a few from Los Angeles with a small telescope of binoculars, and you can see they are closer and a 'thing' compared to a star. With staging you get an expanding plum that can take several minutes to reach maximum size. The size from Los Angeles could be several moon diameters, larger than the size of your outstretched hand. They can look like a 'sun-dog' with bright reflection and often rich colors of blues, reds, purples, pinks. The trail, like the contrail from a plane, but fatter is there also. Over time winds twist and warp the plume out of shape, and it can expand to affect an area of sky larger than the diameter of a yardstick held out by a straight arm, although fainter.
An explosion is usually lower, faster developing, more irregular. These may look different from Hawaii, if launched from Vandenberg. As an artist, I'd like to do some things like this!
Know this.
Right now there are several Near Earth Orbit objects that some coming really fucking close can you say .0081 ?, even if they don't hit they bring debris and flying shit from space along with them, possibly gravity as several are predicted to kind of tag along right next to Earth, also the sun has been going fucking nuts with flares, and in turn, the earth quakes have been off the fucking charts lately, volcanoes off the charts, tsunami warnings a couple damn it! , fires are low/normal, I don't know enough about the G and G2 clouds or whatever the fuck that shit is, hope it don't end up in hard particles which destroy the planet again. Yeah I said again. You deny 35' Giants? Even North America had Giants with TWO ROWS OF TEETH.
Changing pace, Russian government is getting pissed at American Government while American government pokes sticks into (I can't say) but the dilema is what the fuck is so important about Syria? Think Hard Now. Ya have to turn off the disaster in OK, you have to turn off the CHOPPING in UK, you have to fucking get the fuck off slashdot, and go spend 18 or 76 hours a day/days straight, out of your own time in dialogue with your own government. ONLY THEN can you see what this evil bullshit is.
-- I'm on a mission from wake the fuck up!
The UN Security Council has voted that this missle lauch is an aggresive act and have put sanctions on the US. As if
It's chemtrails. It's your government putting mind control chemicals into the atmosphere, and rainbows in your sprinklers.
Hah...
This story being right above "3d printers for peace".
I was thinking the same thing. America is the modern Rome, for a few more years maybe, and if I had had the mod points they would have been yours.
I lived on Kwajalein Missile Range (now Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site) as a kid, the spot in the South Pacific where these target... Cool to watch these come in, with MIRV ablation off causing many streaks of light across the sky, and the RVs landing in the center of the (very large) lagoon.
Wow. Has /. really degenerated into this in the 10+ years I've been visiting? We've gone from discussing the physics behind the halo observed to conspiracy theories and movie references. I'm done here, and get off my lawn.
BTW, this event is called thrust termination. It does not dump fuel, it opens ports on the forward end of stage 3 that effectively negate the forward thrust and facilitate the staging event. Whereas stages 1 and 2 burn out and are jettisoned at the end of their life, this is a precisely programed event depending on the range of the target and/or the intended drop zone of stage 3 (in the case of a test launch). So the hippies and tree huggers out there can calm down right now.
Also, it's called a "Glory Trip" partly because the initials for the mission start with "GT"-- "G" referring to the model of the missile (MMIII) and "T" for test. The operators and maintainers hijacked the designation and called it a "Glory Trip" because they get to see the fruits of their labors, sometimes years in the making.
Something much weirder was seen over Norway when a Russian launch went wrong.
All your ghosts are just false positives.
...but this was not worth a Slashdot story.
The following is from Ted Molczan, an expert on satellites and launches and a major contributor to the seesat-l list. There's a good change of seeing a fuel dump from a Delta 4 medium if you're in the right place at the right time.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
That his response to this glint of light is 'How cool is that?'.
seriously, ive had more interesting patterns in the foam of a mcdonalds cappucino
http://www.awfullybigmoustache.com
it's a Higgs anti-boson missile
They've woken up God now and she's pissed.