I would like to see experts in optical phenomena, meteorologists, and astronomers chime in on this. Just how many launches has the Jane's missile expert studied the contrails of? Just because you know a lot about missiles doesn't mean that you know a lot about vapor trails in the atmosphere.
Like the guy who told me yesterday that he could speak from authority because he lived near an airport?
:)
Sky gets black at that height though ~ disconcerting to the uninitiated I've heard.
The claim is the helicopter took the pictures about 35 miles from the "blast off", so that would mean he was at less than 1500 ft in altitude (for a 35 mile horizon), or he was at 1500 ft., with the 42 mile distant horizon, and that'd mean the distance from the "blast off" to the horizon was about 7 miles.
Then, we have the picture ~ and in that picture we notice that the Sun has already set in the immediate zone of the helicopter but it's still shining above (lighting up the contrail or "exhaust"). In fact, it's lighting up the control for the whole visible length so that means we are looking at a film made some time between about 5 PM and 5:15 PM or so.
As the film runs you can see the light/dark zone move along the cross-section of the contrail ~ it's subtle, but it's there. Since you can't quite see the "blast zone" of the "launch" at the surface, you need to compute that cross section in that contrail ~ which, if coming from a rocket arrived in that location just seconds before ~ not minutes in the case of a contrail from an airplane (which travels at only a fraction of the speed of a missile).
That cross-section there in the part not yet blown by wind is your baseline for the MINIMUM SIZE of the exhaust blast.
With the camera taking in what seems to be about 120 degrees, you'll find that the apparent size is 6 degrees about half way between where the "missile" might be and it's launch point.
A quick computation will reveal that exhaust blast to be about 3300 ft wide!
Well, to say the least, that's an incredibly large exhaust!
Let's assume errors were made in estimating the distance, and take that back to 2 degrees at launch ~ with the largest exhaust blast being 3300 ft wide at takeoff.
Still gives us a huge rocket ~ quite possibly the largest one in history ~ BIGGER EVEN than the space ships in "Independence Day", or the craft flown in by the folks in "V"!
When you do the analysis assuming it could be an airplane, you understand that the contails could be well over a hundred miles away at the furthest (coming up over the curve of the Earth ~ which is round), and wind could easily blow those ice crystals enough so they reflect an awful lot of red light from the Sun ~ PLUS ~ very important ~ the atmosphere has a lensing effect where it magnifies things on the horizon as seen through 40 or 60 miles of atmosphere ~ accounting for magnification the contrail seems pretty normal for a jet at 37,000 miles coming toward us from Hawaii.