Spending a few days at Chincoteague, Virginia, we had the chance to watch the launch of this Artemis rocket from the nearby Wallops Island. It’s actually a Northrup Grumman rocket, and it was going to resupply the International Space Station in a few days. The shots above and several others I copied later from a video on the NASA website. Half of us spent an hour in gridlock getting to the official NASA viewing location near Wattsville (7 miles from the launchpad), and the rest of us took a three minute walk to watch from the edge of the road near the hotel at Chincoteague (10 miles from the launchpad). Google maps illustrates that the view can’t have been much different, and without binocs none of us could have known that tiny object we could barely make out in the distance was a rocket.

My cellphone picture of somebody else’s camera waiting at the NASA site also shows the rocket at lower right, just to the left of a water tower. After it started to get dark, we could however clearly see the bright lights on poles either side of the rocket.

But we had to wait awhile, almost like waiting for it to be dark enough for the fireworks. Finally, 8:31pm, right on time, we had liftoff. My shot from the NASA site, then Sandy’s from near the hotel: