Elon Musk shares high detail footage of Starship launch captured on $17,000 camera lens

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has shared some high-detail footage of the launch and catch of Starship, the world's largest and most powerful rocket.

Elon Musk shares high detail footage of Starship launch captured on $17,000 camera lens
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SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk celebrated the successful launch and catch of Starship, the world's largest and most powerful rocket, by sharing some extremely high-detail footage captured with an expensive camera lens.

The footage was captured by Andrew McCarthy, an astrophotographer who captures incredibly detailed images of astronomical objects from his backyard in Arizona. McCarthy posts the photos and videos to his Instagram account "cosmic_background," which has gained more than 1.6 million followers as of the time of reporting. As for Starship, McCarthy explained via X that he rented a $17,000 lens to capture SpaceX's milestone rocket launch and catch. The results simply speak for themselves.

McCarthy explains in captions within the video that each frame seen is hand-tracked and hand-stabilized. Additionally, the astrophotographer was able to track Starship all the way to orbit at 50 miles altitude, and capture the stage separation moment when Super Heavy disconnected from Starship to make its descent journey back down to Earth and eventual landing on the launch pad it took off from.

McCarthy has also shared his best photos from the event and compiled them all into one composite shot that can be seen above. For those that don't know, Super Heavy is approximately the same height as a 20-story building and weighs multiple tonnes. Now imagine attempting to launch and catch a small building and the difficulty of that task.

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Jak joined the TweakTown team in 2017 and has since reviewed 100s of new tech products and kept us informed daily on the latest science, space, and artificial intelligence news. Jak's love for science, space, and technology, and, more specifically, PC gaming, began at 10 years old. It was the day his dad showed him how to play Age of Empires on an old Compaq PC. Ever since that day, Jak fell in love with games and the progression of the technology industry in all its forms.

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