(CNN)After multiple failed attempts, NASA's Terrier-Improved Malemute sounding rocket lit up the sky with blue-green and red artificial clouds from North Carolina to New York early Thursday morning. The agency is calling it "an early Independence Day fireworks display."
The rocket launched from Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia's eastern shore at 4:25 a.m. and reached an altitude of 118 miles. The flight lasted eight minutes. Four to five minutes in, it deployed 10 canisters about the size of soft drink cans, each containing a colored vapor that forms artificial, luminescent clouds.The launch of the sounding rocket.
They were released 100 miles above the ground, posing no risk to observers. The payload landed in the Atlantic Ocean, about 90 miles (145 kilometers) out to sea from its launch point in Virginia.
The Wallops facility received 2,000 reports and photos captured by onlookers of the colorful clouds up and down the Mid-Atlantic coast, including Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania.
Christopher Becke, a high school physics teacher in Williamsburg, Virginia, captured images and a timelapse of the clouds.
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