Happy New Year - Reprise

Many of you saw my New Year's photo:

New Years Greetings

I decided on a whim late in the evening of New Years Eve to put an appropriately themed photo on the Blog. So I went to the train room and ... cobbled it together from what I could find in my supplies.

The scene when the room lights are on

The obviously oversized rocket is made from a small piece of styrene pipe. The wood stabilizer is represented with a bit of wire. I painted the styrene to finish the rocket ... and should have used brighter colors, since the rocket becomes really dark and hard to see in the final photo.
The rocket got super glued to a strand of glass fiber from the MicroMark fiber experimentation packet. The fiber is threaded through a small hole through the road bed. I used BlueTack to hold the rocket launchers (which are actually just random passengers), and the switch man in the background in place.

Lighting the rocket

A yellow LED lights the other end of the fiber. In combination with leakage from the fiber this creates the rocket launch effect.

Finally, the photo was taken with a Nexus 6 Android smart phone, placed directly on the tracks, and supported at the correct angle with random wood working tools I had handy. I turned off the regular room lights, and only left a single blue bulb on to simulate night light. Since the yard lights didn't really illuminate the scene, I added some additional spot light with a small LED flash light.

That's it. The photo went straight from the phone to the Blog. No post-processing on the computer. With some more time, I would have pulled out the SLR and do this properly. However, we were getting close to midnight and it was time to check out what's happening in the neighborhood...