So it occurred to me, while sleeping no less, that I was on the correct coast to maybe watch a launch real-time as I am in South Carolina. For once such an impulse paid off -big time. Scroll down to the comments where I'll post more of the sequence. Wow!
It gets very easy to lose the forest for the trees these days: there's so much negative stuff going on that the good things can become harder to notice. This was a spectacular exception. As neat as the photos are, the experience - seeing it play across the sky in huge, vivid detail - was inspiring.
So cool!!!!!
Awesome!!!
Over the next five minutes, the burn got brighter and brighter, curving across the SC sky right over me. Eventually, it disappeared into the nascent sunrise.
Some of the photos used my Pixel 3a's Night Sight feature. I wasn't sure which mode would produce the best pictures. Turns out it was so bright, both worked pretty well.
Shortly after that photo, stage 1 separated. It appears in the contrail as a bright dot with its own trail.
The first picture shows a tiny orange dot - this was near the end of the first stage. It disappeared momentarily, and I thought it was gone. Ahh, no.