[X] My Assistant

[ugordan]

One thing has been bugging me for a while now. There's a curious feature that appears in many shuttle launch videos (well, not only shuttle videos, but they're most prominent there). I'm talking about the following optical effects:


Now, my sort-of-educated guess would be this is a shockwave related phenomenon. Once the launch vehicle becomes supersonic, it creates a shockwave that compresses air at its front. This changes the index of refraction if the shocking is strong enough.
The same thing happens during an atmospheric nuclear detonation where the shock can be seen "breaking" the traces of the smoke rockets behind the detonation (in case you ever wondered what the smoke rockets were for )


I don't think it's related to optics in the tracker. Notice how the linear refraction is always perpendicular to the motion of the shuttle. What puzzles me is just how many of these linear features there are during the course of the liftoff. Furthermore, they seem to dance around each other exhibiting complex behavior one would not expect of a simple supersonic shock front...

Very interesting in any case, if anyone has more info about it, I'd be happy to hear it.
BTW, the launch video I took the screenshots from can be found at www.insideksc.com, specifically here.