Rockets

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	Jan 2010 : Grant Park baseball field
	Dec 2009 : Grant Park baseball field
	1979 : Model Rocket Launch

	1976? : I built one of these years ago
	And here it is - I think 110 film is long gone.
	and took pictures at Shamrock High School

	I built at least 50 rockets back in the 1970's and 1980's.
	This one was fun, despite its (obviously) low altitude.

Pictures do not do this one justice - quite a good looking model.

This one appears a few times in the old 8mm movies.

This was the mack daddy from the Estes catalog back in the day.

I always liked this one because of the stub nose.

And this one always flew well, owing to (unusually) straight construction.

I built a variety of the odd ones - rocket gliders (like this one), gyroc (rocket to helicopter-style landing), etc.

At age 9 or so, someone introduced me to the idea of the tangent, so here is a protractor on a stick. The idea is to stand a known distance from launch pad, shoot the rocket like a sectant and record the angle, then compute the altitude assuming the rocket goes straight up. Even if the rocket goes straight up, even a minor error in angle translate to a huge error in altitude. So estimating the altitude by eye is probably a better measure. But I enjoyed building this thing and using it.

And a few more.