(Mini competition below)

As most of us already know, Space X has launched a Tesla car into space, with 'Starman' in the front seat - a mannequin dressed in Elon Musk's spacesuit design.

I felt it unnecessary to write about it since it'll be saturated the world over, but the live feed switched off after the successful launch was witnessed by millions... or so you thought!

In fact, Starman's journey continued to be live streamed for another 5 hours as the payload coasted around the earth to demonstrate some of its space-faring chops to would-be satellite launchers. This gave a fantastic opportunity to see the beautiful round/flat/spiral (??) planet that we live on, interrupted only by the obnoxious red car. I wasn't kidding about the spiral earth by the way. New theory:

I scoured this livestream to find anything worth viewing and there really was some wonderful shots to experience. I'll try to give as much insight as I can.

Reflections

This shot I thought was pretty cool purely due to the casual look on Starman's face, but otherwise nothing unusual to see here. Other than, you know, the fact that we launched a car into space.

Flat Earth

As the spacecraft rotates, we get all manner of angles to enjoy, complemented by numerous cameras. This one was a fully zoomed out shot with pretty much everything in frame. One thing that struck me here was the very faint purple hue around the earth's edge.

This is actually something flat-earther's use to 'prove' the footage as fake but it's actually well documented and explained in a couple of ways. In the case of NASA photography, they take several shots of the earth through the colour spectrum starting at ultraviolet and ending in infrared. The difference in time between these shots means the leading edge of the planet has a slight green hue and the other side may have a slight red or purple hue.

In the case of Space X, it's probably a similar chromatic aberration that you see commonly in photography, but as you watch the video, the purple lines slowly fade as that part of earth reaches the central focal point of the camera.

Warp Speed

This screenshot is just fantastic. It's almost as if Starman is about to hit warp speed! Of course, it is in fact just the glaring sun, presumably bleaching the car into oblivion with radiation and heat.

This next shot is also great, since you get to see the car, the sun and the earth (in the car's reflection) in a single shot. As the car continues to rotate, the sun dips behind the headgear, creating a new kind of solar eclipse!

Super Moon

There were only two moments that I found where the moon came into the shot. In this shot, it's fairly faint, down in the bottom left corner, but full screen you can actually see half-moon shape as it goes behind the car and pops out briefly on the bottom right corner.

The second time I saw it was actually from the rocket cam, very faintly in the top left:

UFO

There were a few strange moments like this. Clearly, there's a lot of extra-terrestrial life keeping an eye on us in the shadows.

This one was particularly cool because it actually looked like some sci-fi star base fading in from blackness before slowly vanishing again.

Another I saw was a dim red ring that slowly faded and returned as two interlinked red rings, then three! Before disappearing again.

This next one, however, I can't explain:

At first I thought the spacecraft was simply rotating fairly rapidly and we were witnessing the stars passing by the shot. Except it was actually rotating slowly as always and these were much too bright to be stars. There's hundreds of them passing by throughout the live stream.

In the above shot you can see at least 4 white dots that were quickly floating upwards - according to the camera - quickly at different angles, either straight up or diagonally to the left. Some were bigger than others, some were slower than others.

The earth is immediately to the right so I suppose they were generally zooming around the earth in orbit. Space debris? Perhaps too slow for that.

I've genuinely no idea or any clue where to start guessing so any insight on this would be appreciated!

Spirit Bomb

This one is a real reminder of the true power the sun provides us. At this angle the reflection of the light is so powerful that it looks essentially like the outer edge of Goku's Spirit bomb from Dragon Ball Z.

All of the light in this shot is pure sun energy, photons showering down on us in their trillions-per-nanosecond.

It's also pretty cool how you can actually see a partial reflection of the blueness of the earth in the windshield, the space helmet and near the headlight.

Mini Competition

Most of the journey on camera was seen hovering over the Pacific ocean, but that wasn't entirely the case, it's just that the Pacific is really big. Like, bigger than any map gives it credit for. But there was some notable shots of land.

Let's see if anybody can guess where Starman is flying over in this shot? Egypt? The Horn of Africa? The edge of China? Think about it, I'll drop the answer in my next post!

If you can be extremely specific, say, even dropping the coastline details, I might even give a little SBD reward (and I mean little)

What's next?

Now, Starman is on his way to the orbit of Mars... except Elon Musk informed us all that they actually overshot the trajectory and now it's heading for the asteroid belt!

Hopefully we will be lucky enough to witness some fantastic flybys, if not Mars itself, then any other rocky surfaces out there.