Well, there's the Estes Astrobeam, which is actually a VERY cool looking kit for night launches...
Then of course there's the 'scratchie' night flyers, which are the faves at our (Challenger 498) night launches...
I've actually got several of the night flyers currently sitting on my shelf, as they started drifting towards the end of the evening and I spent an extra half hour or so on the golf cart with my daughter in the back pasture (which had just been cut for hay right before our last night launch) and we recovered a couple wayward night flyers that went AWOL.
Mine is a sorta Big Bertha clone using 24 mm BP motors, either D12-3 or E9-4's... it has one of those children's "whirlygig" spinning ring with LED's inside a clear plastic globe type toys, which I pick up for like $3 each at TSC, among other places. They're powered by AA batteries so they last a pretty long time, but they're kinda heavy (but fine for a "D" or "E" powered rocket). It recovers under a 24-32 inch parachute. The rocket has a large standoff one one side and the launch lug is halfway out one fin, to clear the ~3 inch globe of the whirlygig toy. It's made from paper towel tubes covered with typing paper. She's rough but she went together cheap and dirty and flies great and looks awesome in the air... I call her the "Warp Drive". The whirlygig toy's "press and hold for on" button is held "on" by wrapping some electric tape around the handle with a bit of balsa strategically placed to hold the button down, yet can be wiggled off the button after recovery for reloading, to preserve the batteries.
Mikus's bird this year for the night launch was a Baby Bertha, equipped with a small push-button LED light taped under the nosecone in the hole left from the blow-molding process used to make the cone. The cone is painted flourescent pink and the LED light shining into it causes it to glow brightly. The LED can also be set to flashing mode, which is cool. It looks really good and flew well, but beware of weak springs under the batteries and shim the batteries up tight!
I've got another rocket here that looks to be a Stormcaster or something similar. It has a small LED lit "probe" sticking out of the nose-- a clear plastic rod with a few odd bubbles in it lit from the base of it (inside the tip of the nosecone) so the whole rod glows bright blue. He also painted the rocket with some of the washable glow-in-the-dark paint from Hobby Lobby-- you couldn't really see the glow in the dark paint flying at night-- it's far too faint, but it looks awfully ghostly sitting on my rocket shelf happily glowing eerily at night in the living room!! Also beware, because after the dew falls, you will find your hands glowing after handling the rocket because the paint will come off on you wherever you touch the rocket.
After year before last's night launch, we had two MIA rockets-- Mikus's Blue Ninja with several glow sticks taped to the outside, and Dave's "Hi-Jax" with a simple flashing red LED "beer bottle" lapel pin turned on and crammed into the clear payload tube with a bit of foam to keep it from rattling around too much. The wind had kicked up a bit and carried them off, but I found the LED powered Hi-Jax within about ten minutes of everyone leaving. Despite searching the pastures for about an hour or so, I never could find the Blue Ninja, well, not until a couple months later when I was out feeding cows and happened upon it out in the pasture in an unanticipated area-- it had suffered some from the wet winter weather and had a couple broken fins, the tube had seen better days but was intact, and the prismatic tube wraps were faded out completely on the top skyward side from sitting in the sun, and the shock cord turned to crumbles... but otherwise it was amazingly intact, LED lightsticks and all... I'd recommend against the LED lightsticks-- the light intensity is just too low to see these rockets in flight or even on the ground after recovery...
I've got two projects in the works for this year's night launch-- I got some neat LED lights at Academy that have built in flashlights in one end, and a semi-clear tube on the other, with an LED shining up into it... Some are red, some green, some blue. The clear tube has a cap on the end, and if you take the cap off, the end of the tube has a whistle built into it. All of that is clear so the whistle and cap glow the same color as the tube. It should fit in a BT-50. Here's the link:
https://www.lifegearcompany.com/glowsticks.html
I'm thinking of either using them as a nosecone for a BT-50 size rocket, or using them as outriggers or "warp nacelles" for some kind of night rocket...
The other project I'm working on is top secret...
Later! OL JR
