So Long, Starman! Skywatchers Spot Falcon Heavy Leaving Earth's Orbit

Falcon Heavy 3rd Burn
Photographer Alexx Mayes captured this view of the Falcon Heavy's third burn near Reno, Nevada on Feb. 6, 2018. (Image credit: Alexx Mayes)

Six hours after SpaceX launched its new Falcon Heavy rocket on its first test flight yesterday (Feb. 6), unsuspecting skywatchers in the western U.S. caught a glimpse of the rocket's second stage firing up one last time as it blasted out of Earth's orbit and off into the solar system.

Riding on the rocket's second stage was Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster, an electric vehicle with a dummy named "Starman" behind the wheel. After the launch, the car and its passenger spent nearly 6 hours orbiting the Earth on the rocket's second stage, or the upper portion of the rocket that is designed to deliver payloads into orbit.  [In Photos: SpaceX's 1st Falcon Heavy Rocket Test Launch Success!]

At about 9:45 p.m. EST (0245 GMT), the rocket performed its third and final burn, which was supposed to send this dummy payload cruising by Mars in an elliptical orbit around the sun. (However, the rocket overshot its target and ended up on a path toward the asteroid belt instead.)

Shortly after the second stage initiated this burn, people in the western U.S. began reporting rocket sightings in the evening sky. While SpaceX has not officially confirmed that the images or videos on social media were of the Falcon Heavy, it was the only rocket scheduled to be flying over the Earth at that time and place, so it seems highly unlikely these spectators saw anything else.

While many of the witnesses reported seeing the rocket by chance when they just happened to look up, at least one telescope — the MMT Observatory (MMTO) in Mount Hopkins, Arizona — spotted the Falcon Heavy during routine night-sky observations.

"The big, fast-moving blob is the exhaust from the Falcon Heavy's burn," Timothy Pickering, a staff scientist at MMTO, said in a tweet. "There's also a plane heading north at the beginning and a small satellite at the end."

Another Twitter user, Brittany Brelle, shared a photo of the rocket taken from Southern California, tweeting, "Moral of the story: Always look up and follow the moving thing in the sky."

Editor's note: If you have an amazing photo of the Falcon Heavy that you'd like to share for a possible story or image gallery, please contact managing editor Tariq Malik at spacephotos@space.com.

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos.