Starship Asterisk*

Oh right I forgot to mention the ullage motors, those are common to nearly all staged rockets. I assumed that the BSM's would be too faint and short-lived to been seen in the photograph, thought I could be wrong. Does anyone know how bright they are?

So here is the problem: the period of brightening shows up in nearly every night-time time lapse photo of any shuttle launch I can find (assuming that the contrast is good enough to see anything in the first place and that the exposure is long enough). I can also say that the brightening correlates ...

115 miles of tropospheric air & dust scattering can produce a lot of dimming. But then why does it get brighter again? It's not significantly higher in altitude or in local horizon coordinates (has basically the same airmass) than when it is dim right before the brightening. Plus the atmosphere...

You know what really bothered me is the brightening in the flight path around 2/3rds of the way up. I kept thinking it must be the throttle up, but it happens much to late. In fact it is after SRB separation. Any idea exactly why it get brighter after SRB separation? Also here is a lengthy discussio...