"Clocks"

Picture 4 (left); Picture 5 (below)












Last week at B3ta, the Question Of The Week was:

The Soundtrack of your Life: Che Grimsdale writes: Now that Simon Cowell's stolen Everybody Hurts, tell us about songs that mean something to you - good, bad, funny or tragic, appropriate or totally inappropriate songs that were playing at key times.

This Question was similar to one in 2005, and I answered with the same story:

Clocks

(a repost, but still haunts me)

I was playing Coldplay's "Clocks" while driving into a California sunset in September 2002, when I suddenly saw a strange contrail rapidly heading west into the sunset. It was the first time I ever saw such a thing: a Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile heading from Vandenburg Air Force Base to Kwajalein Atoll, located many thousands of miles away in the Pacific.The missile was many hundreds of miles away from my car, but because of good visibility in the gloaming, it was possible to see the rocket stage. The missile contrail changed from dense smoke into a translucent glimmering perfect cone, as the upper stages of the missile ripped into the mesosphere. It was gorgeous and scary at the same time.When I hear "Clocks", I sense nuclear annihilation is near and my time on this Earth is over.

A B3ta fan answered:

I like this because I like missiles...

...although I'm not such a fan of Coldplay.

I did some googling - is this the launch you saw?

I replied:

Excellent Googling!

I'm sure that's the correct launch! Santa Barbara is much closer to the launch site than I was and so this observer had the best of views. It looks like the observer played with the exposure in order to photograph into a bright sunset sky. Pictures 4 & 5 show the upper stage departing from the smoky, lower-stage contrail. The luminescent shimmering cone of the upper stage exhaust is harder to see in these images than I remember, probably because of blurring.The end is nigh! 'Clocks' are striking midnight!