Enjoy mesmerizing views of Earth from Starman's Tesla on its journey

Enjoy mesmerizing views of Earth from Starman's Tesla as it journey

Enjoy mesmerizing views of Earth from Starman's Tesla as it journeys deeper into the great void, while your consciousness drifts away on hypnotic waves of ambient music.

To answer some common questions:

0) SHANE DAWSON! Some YouTubers claim there was a "glitch" in the SpaceX live stream that showed the car inside a film studio. What the clip showed was the inside of the rocket's payload fairing (nose), right before it opened up and exposed the car to space. Here are some photos of the car being mounted in the Falcon Heavy's 6 million dollar, 43-foot high payload fairing. http://tiny.cc/SpaceXTeslaPayloadFairing - And here is a graphic showing how the car is mounted to the top of the rocket. http://tiny.cc/TeslaOnRocket

1) NOT LIVE! This footage originally aired live on February 6, 2018. This stream is a cleaned-up replay loop with music and chat.

2) SpaceX intended the system to only transmit video for a few hours after the launch. That's all they wanted, or needed.

3) Starman is now tens of millions of miles from Earth, orbiting the Sun (not Mars) at a speed ranging from 44,000 mph (20 km/s) to 75,000 mph (34 km/s). To track its position, visit http://whereisroadster.com.

4) Starman is in a heliocentric orbit - around the Sun - that will take it past the orbit of Mars by a few million km, but not as far as the asteroid belt. It is expected to continue orbiting for millions of years. There's a small chance that it could collide with Earth, Venus, or the Sun in the distant future.

5) SpaceX launched Elon Musk's car into space because they needed to test the new Falcon Heavy rocket with a dummy payload. They wanted to use something more interesting than concrete blocks or steel. The Falcon Heavy is so powerful that it could have lifted *47* Tesla Roadsters into orbit!

6) The continent you see is Australia. Papua New Guinea and part of Africa are barely visible. If you only see water, it's because the Tesla wasn't far enough away from Earth to see the whole hemisphere. The island of New Caledonia appears as a dark cigar shape against the bright sunglint on the ocean (some mistake it as a UFO).

7) You don't see any stars because they are too dim to see when the camera is configured to properly expose the brightly-lit Tesla and Earth. If the camera's light sensitivity were adjusted to show the stars then Starman, the Tesla, and Earth would be bright white blobs. Here's a video where I explain and demonstrate: http://tiny.cc/NoStars

8) You don't see clouds moving because they are thousands of miles away. The clouds would need to be moving faster than the speed of sound in order for you to see any movement during the brief time it takes for the Earth to traverse the video frame.

9) You don't see the Earth's rotation because it takes 24 hours to rotate, yet the video pans past Earth in less than a minute. That's not enough time to notice any rotation.

10) During the dark part of the video when the camera is adjusted for very low light, the frequent little pixel flashes are caused by particles of radiation from the Van Allen Belts striking the camera sensor. The bright light flashes that look like explosions are lightning storms on the planet below. The dim gray blobs are city lights. The bright line that moves across the car is a reflection of the sunset on the horizon, overexposed because the camera auto-adjusted its low light sensitivity .

11) The apparent dust that is sometimes visible on the Tesla's hood may be rocket fuel spray, exhaust, or frozen water microparticles (frost) that condensed while it was inside the payload fairing. All of the material came from the rocket, not from space.

12) The bits of white material that you see occasionally floating past are just frozen rocket fuel droplets, exhaust, dust, or paint flecks from the rocket. They are not bubbles, stars, or UFO's. Everything you see that's moving [besides Earth and Moon] came from the rocket, not from space.

13) The occasional "poofs" of white cloud that flash momentarily behind the Tesla are exhaust gases from the attitude thrusters as they fire to adjust the rocket's position.

14) SpaceX put the Tesla into a slow spin so that it could capture these amazing Earth views. It's traveling an almost-straight path (its elliptical orbit is larger than Earth's orbit). If you strap a GoPro to a football and throw it, the footage will look chaotic, even though the trajectory of the football is smooth.

15) The small round crescent Moon shaped object that sometimes drifts across the frame is, in fact, the Moon. Not a UFO. It looks small because of the wide angle camera lens being used. Try taking an un-zoomed photo of the Moon with your cell phone. It will look very small.

16) The huge blue object is the Earth.  Also not a UFO.