May 25th, 2018: Canon Melt on Toasted Tripod with a Side of Ash

[xoxoxoBruce]

Space rockets make hot exhaust you couldn’t dream of replicating with Mexican food, hot peppers, and Chinese mustard.

NASA photographer Bill Ingalls posted this photo of his melted Canon camera after it was destroyed by a brush fire sparked by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on May 22, 2018.

The "toasty" camera was a Canon DSLR that Ingalls placed about a quarter mile (1,320 feet, or 402 meters) from SpaceX's pad, called Space Launch Complex 4E, at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It was one of six remote cameras that the photographer set up to chronicle the launch of NASA's twin GRACE-FO satellites on Tuesday.

In one photo, the camera snapped a single frame of the SpaceX Falcon 9 as it began to lift off.
The next photo was…



This is the first camera he’s lost in 29 years of taking launch photos.

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