What's that in the sky?

Last evening, we were outside seeing the beautiful sunset...

The reflection in the foreground is on the roof of the Jeep.

Beautiful!

We are in a grove of date palms - they make parking big rigs here "interesting".

We decided to walk around and see Christmas decorations around the park...

There are a couple that are quite extravagant!

This is in the area where there are cottages. It looks like the cottage that has the most of the decorations may be semi-permanently occupied by the residents for the winter.

Another one has lots of decorations around their pickup truck camper - Santa on a tractor on top! The tractor is green on the back (which is where I first saw it) so I thought it was a John Deere!

The whole display! The snowman on the right shivers. He also has motion sensor music. 

The campground has a Christmas site decoration contest - we were very impressed. The winners are to be determined this afternoon (Saturday).

While we were talking with the guy who "lives" at the pickup camper display (they are just here for a week), I noticed a strange light in the sky...

What is that? When I first saw it, it looked like a very bright contrail, and then it kinda exploded into a larger object.

Wow!

The owner/artist of the Christmas decorations was talking with us when we noticed it and he indicated that it was probably a rocket launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Sure enough, we found information online at: http://spacearchive.info/vafbsked.htm - I snipped the part for this launch as it will probably be removed since it is now in the past:

Here is a news report about it: http://abc7.com/technology/final-spacex-rocket-launch-of-2017-lights-up-socal-sky/2813922/
Friends staying as far away as Mesa, Arizona saw it too - they posted this news article: 
https://www.abc15.com/news/news-photo-gallery/spacex-rocket-launch-seen-across-arizona-friday-night#id0

One of the articles I read (http://fortune.com/2017/12/23/spacex-california-launch/) indicated that, though the rocket delivering the satellites had been reused in the past, it was not going to be reused after this flight, so I guess that was the object we saw separating from the rest of the glow and descending to fall into the ocean.

Pretty neat to see God's majesty in painting the sky, and God's majesty in giving understanding to men to be able to put satellites into the sky as well!