Viewing fireworks from a drone

Butte has a longstanding tradition of a massive fireworks show above Uptown on July 3rd and then a 4th of July parade down Harrison Avenue at noon on the 4th. In recent years, Town Pump – one of the largest businesses in Butte – has sponsored the fireworks show, and for 2026 they devoted extra funding to it, making last night's event the biggest fireworks show in Montana this year.

The whole town of Butte gets into the fireworks show each year, with viewing parties all over town and thousands of folding chairs set up at every spot with a view of Big Butte. Many people are in their favorite viewing spots hours before the show starts, and after the show ends we get the biggest traffic jams I've ever seen in Butte – all of Uptown is in gridlock for a long time while everyone is trying to get back home.

Our house doesn't have a view of the fireworks, because we're down on the Lower West Side below Montana Technical University. Montana Tech sits on a bluff and blocks our view of Big Butte, and there are also tall trees across the street from us that block our view of the sky above Big Butte as well.

That means we have to go out if we want to see the show. But the dogs hate the fireworks, so we don't go out and leave them alone at home that night. In the last six years, I've only seen the fireworks show once, when my friend Lars was visiting from Norway in 2023 and we took a cooler of beer and two folding chairs up to the area behind Big Butte, where we hung out all evening while Megan stayed home to comfort the dogs.

This year, I decided to try something different. I've enjoyed the views I can get with the drone I picked up last year, and I decided to check out what kinds of photos and video I could get with the drone from high above our neighborhood, where Montana Tech and the tall trees wouldn't block the view.

At 9:48 last night, I got a LAANC authorization to fly the drone up to 400 feet above our house for two hours. For an after-dark flight like that, you have to have a Part 107 drone license, and you have to have an FAA-approved strobe light attached to your drone, which makes it highly visible to others. I put my strobe on the drone, and took off from the deck.

After a bit of experimentation, I decided that I liked the view best from about 200 feet above our house. That's high enough for an unobstructed view, but still low enough to be looking up at all the fireworks.

Folks in Butte really get into fireworks each year, and I was surprised at how much was going on all around town, well before the big show was scheduled to start. There were fireworks visible in every neighborhood, and many of them were clearly illegal devices, causing huge explosions that were sometimes hundreds of feet in the air. Not a drone-friendly environment, for sure.

While flying around to check out some possible vantage points, I saw a bright object moving up toward my drone. It was moving more slowly than fireworks, and then I realized it was a colorful helium balloon. I maneuvered away from it before it passed the drone heading up.

With all of that chaos in the skies, I decided to stick to the location directly above our house, so that if the drone got knocked out of the sky it would be easier to recover. Luckily, that never happened.

I recorded some video of the amateur fireworks around Uptown, and then landed the drone to preserve battery life while waiting for the show to start.

Town Pump had announced that the show would start at 10:31PM, so I got the drone into position a few minutes before then. It was interesting to see many of the informal fireworks around town building to a climax in those final minutes before the main event. It felt choreographed – the smaller shows ended with a flourish, then a brief moment of relative silence, and then the big show began.

By the way, you may wonder how I got audio on the two clips above, since most drones (including mine) don't have a microphone. I used my little DJI Osmo Action 6 to record audio, by simply setting it on the deck while it recorded a long video, then I synched that audio with the drone videos in post-production.

Next year

This was an interesting experiment, and now I'm thinking I'll try to take it to the next level for the fireworks show in 2027. I've done some research and found that it's possible to use a USB-C to HDMI cable to stream the 4K video from my drone's RC2 remote controller to an external monitor. So I'm thinking I could stream the fireworks show to our big-screen TV while the drone is hovering 200 feet above the backyard, and we can sit in the parlor and watch the show in real time . We could crank up the stereo to drown out the explosions, and stay home to comfort the dogs while watching the show from our favorite chairs with our favorite drinks in hand. That's the plan, anyway – I'll report back next year on how it works out.