Spectacular new aerial photos!

More than a month after my Nevada trip, the torn muscle in my leg had
finally healed and I was chomping at the bit to fly some rockets again.
So I made some arrangements and headed out to the desert last week for
a brief overnight trip.

I had hoped to get there in time to launch a couple rockets prior to
sunset, but got delayed. I just barely managed to get a two-stager
prepped and ready to fly in time, on an I284 in the booster and an I211
in the second stage. Great flight, but the camera jammed at liftoff --
no pics. Took quite a while to find the booster, which ended up in a
large ocotillo.

The next morning I had three rockets ready to launch simultaneously.
The biggest was a 2.6" diameter two-stage, with a J180 booster and J135
sustainer. Next was a single stage 2.6" rocket on an I211; and finally
a 1.8" rocket with an Ellis I69 and four D12's in strap on boosters.

The two-stage flew perfectly, reaching an altitude of 8144 feet while
taking some of the most eye-popping aerial photos I've ever gotten.

The single stage rocket also flew fine but again, the camera jammed at
liftoff. Usually that's a pretty rare failure mode with this
combination of rocket and motor. Apparently the motor lit just as the
camera was snapping a photo, with its lens extended, and the sudden
jolt caused the lens mechanism to jam.

The 1.8" rocket had an magnetic apogee detector to deploy the chutes,
and for some unknown reason it failed to fire the charge. The rocket
came in ballistic from at least 3000 feet and was destroyed.

About an hour after launching those three rockets, I fired off one more
small one -- a good flight with some pretty decent pics.

The rest of the day was spent recovering everything. A RocketHunter
tracking transmitter was attached to the camera payload of the
two-stage rocket, and performed impressively. The camera and rocket
landed over a mile way in the middle of a maze of narrow canyons, yet
the tracker lead me right to it! The hard part was finding my way
through the maze -- if I'd been able to walk straight towards the
transmitter, I could have recovered it in short order. Once I had
recovered the camera, I then had to seach the surrounding area unaided,
to find the second stage rocket.

Here are the pics:

http://albums.photo.epson.com/j/AlbumIndex?u=3009006&a=30098271&f=0

Enjoy!

.

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