Spring Rockets

The sun was out and the snow was mostly gone last weekend and the boys were chomping at the bit to do something fun. We still have a bunch of rocket motors sitting around, so we went to the new subdivision that's going in south of us (Wilderness Hills) and shot rockets into the wind. I used to only shoot rockets on calm days, but waiting for a calm day here would be like waiting for ....
Our first launch of CP's Patriot missle on a B6-4 failed to completely deploy the chute and landed hard (but relatively undamaged) less than 10' from the launch facility.

GP gets ready to mash the launch button and send his Mongoose 1000' into the wind. Even with a streamer recovery, it drifted a 10 minute walk into the mud, burrs, and weeds.

Have I ever mentioned that there's an overabundance of mud here? It's pretty much like the red clay in Georgia, but it's brown and fortunately doesn't stain like the red stuff.

My new Nikon is awsome to shoot. I only have a normal lens on it (18-70), but it is sharp enough that I can enlarge little patches for decent looking pictures. There's a bit of grain, but none of the chromatic aberation that my last camera suffered from. In this shot, it was able to lock onto the rocket before the chute fully deployed way up in the sky.