Launch leftovers


Tim Song Jones, taken from Afton, CA

These swirling, iridescent clouds lit by the fading Sun are the remains of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket contrail, launched the evening of Oct. 27 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California to carry a fresh batch of Starlink satellites to orbit. According to SpaceX, it was the eighth launch for this booster, which had previously launched NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission.