A photographer at a campsite in a Manitoba country park saw an amazing sight as he stared at the stars – the launch of a SpaceX rocket launched into the sky.
Justin Anderson, a Manitoba-based pursuer of Aurora and a night sky photographer, was camping in Nopimingig Provincial Park over the weekend with a friend. They were filming the Northern Lights when they saw something around 1:13 a.m. Sunday.
“It was all luck,” Anderson told CTV News. We had just returned to our campsite when he pointed to me, saying, “Hey, what’s in the sky?” And we initially thought it was the moon just because it was so bright – and it was just getting brighter. and brighter.
“Then I grabbed my camera and started recording.”
What Anderson and his friend saw hundreds of miles above their heads was the launch of the SpaceX Globalstar FM15 mission. The Falcon 9 rocket launched on Sunday at 12:27 pm ET from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Anderson said he had never seen anything like it before and did not expect to see it in Manitoba.
“It’s been on my rocket launch list for a while,” he said. “But I thought I would have to plan a trip to Florida for that, not a trip to Nopiming Provincial Park.”
Scott Young, an astronomer at the Manitoba Museum Planetarium, said there were similar observations across North America.
“It coincides exactly with the path of the SpaceX rocket, which essentially launched a satellite into orbit,” he told CTV News. “A lot of people could see it. They have no idea what it is right now, and only then can we understand what it was.”
He said it takes a lot of luck to be able to see a rocket like this shoot over the stars. However, Young said it is the perfect time of year to look at the sky as the northern hemisphere approaches the summer solstice. During this time, the sky from our perspective is dark, but everything in orbit is illuminated by sunlight, which gives observers of the stars quite a show.
“If you don’t see a new rocket launch, you can see an old rocket spinning around and flashing, or a satellite where the sun is shining from the solar panel,” he said. “There’s always something going on up there in the sky, so it’s always worth watching.”
Young said that what makes these kinds of observations so spectacular is the fact that you don’t need specialized equipment to see it – you just have to be in the right place at the right time.
Anderson said that now that he has seen him, he plans to spend a little more time planning his travels, hoping to catch another launch.
“It was a pretty amazing experience,” he said. “And it was very special to get my first rocket launch in Manitoba.”
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