Atlas V Launch from Cape Canaveral 8 Aug 2019

Nice twilight phenomenon!

Very cool!

When I was a kid, we used to see this all the time from Vandenburg AFB.

It is an awesome sight!

Yes, when I was at VAFB this kind of thing was common. I recall one night I was going to bed and heard a Minutemen launch. I looked out the window, saw it go up.and then the Sun over the horizon hit it. It lit up so brightly that I knew right away people would be thinking it had exploded.

Sure enough, in a few minutes the phone rang. It was a friend, working at the local TV station, asking if a rocket had blown up. I told her it was twilight phenomenon, the Sun hitting the rocket in the dark sky. I set up the VCR to record the TV news and the next morning watched them come on and say that there had been reports of an explosion but that a "local missile expert" had said it was the Sun hitting the rocket.

Here is a shot of another Atlas V from the Cape on 2 Sep 2015.

While attending AFROTC training at VAFB in 1978, during a briefing we were having, there was a much louder than normal launch event (later confirmed to be a KH satellite on Titan-3D). Everything stopped due to the sound and shaking. I asked "what was that?"

The instructor, without missing a beat, replied "What was what? I didn't hear anything, and neither did you!"

Ah... life at Vandyland... always interesting.

On one launch of a classified mission in 1987, we were told that morning that a hundred or so boy scouts had been delivered to Jalama Beach Park, a location too close to the launch trajectory, AFTER the area had been cleared.

So the scouts were told that the USAF was going to provide them with a free breakfast at the base dining hall and buses were dispatched to pick them up.