Photos of Planes and Contrails (That you took yourself)

[Mick West]

Believed to be from OSCE observation drones in Donetsk, Ukraine, currently the only aviation permitted under the ceasefire in that war zone.

http://vk.com/wall-71845958_7312

This thread is for photos you took yourself, not for photos other people took.

 

[M Bornong]

My wife and I took a trip to visit her family in Kansas. These were taken at my stepson's place near Parker Kansas, September 14, 2014.


7:22 pm Central time


Same contrail, 7:34 pm


Na Zdorovie

 

[WeedWhacker]

Na Zdorovie

(На здоровье)

 

[M Bornong]

(На здоровье)

I've never been very good with Cyrillic. My dad was a research chemist at the Rock Island Arsenal, he taught himself Russian so he could read the Russian Journals during the Cold War. It never quite rubbed off on me.

 

[WeedWhacker]

I've never been very good with Cyrillic. My dad was a research chemist at the Rock Island Arsenal, he taught himself Russian so he could read the Russian Journals during the Cold War.

Admission: I simply c/p'ed from the old Google-machine. But, I am fascinated by Cyrillic....and, veered OT...... "spasiba" and "dosvedanya"....the extent, here. (in my "repertoire"....oh yeah, I took French....in High School....).

Scurries away......

 

[KAT]

Believed to be from OSCE observation drones in Donetsk, Ukraine, currently the only aviation permitted under the ceasefire in that war zone.

http://vk.com/wall-71845958_7312
This thread is for photos you took yourself, not for photos other people took."

Sorry. If I were there it would not be contrails I''d be photographing.

Anyway, I thought people might be interested to see a contrail from a drone, for a change, as they're generally not much used in the kind of peaceful places most of the other images come from.

 

[Trailblazer]

A very unseasonably warm day yesterday in Kent (southeast England) and so I spent the day on the beach. Lots of contrails around, preceding a change of weather type overnight with showers today.

Only phone pictures, but I'm sharing as there was quite a lot going on overhead!

Contrail crossing the sun and casting a shadow on the thin cloud below:



Nicely defined pendules:



Hybrid contrail (?) with a faint sun dog in the cloud just below it.



And part of a 22-degree halo just visible at the top here I think:

 

[cloudspotter]

KLM KL643 Amsterdam - New York Boeing 747-406 (M) 36000ft

 

[CapnPegleg]

Sunrise in San Diego county. Miramar airshow today, lots of persistant contrails already, should be a filled sky later! Not to mention the oil smoke from the Blue Angels.

 

[Mick West]

Contrails are back in Los Angeles. Nice edge shadow

 

[Mick West]

Here's a panorama view of that contrail. The sun was in the south, the shadow was in the north. So it's rather unintuitive as to why it casts a shadow. This is why you get people saying "it's not a shadow, it was nowhere near the sun".


And a video

 

[WeedWhacker]

Contrails are back in Los Angeles.

You posted just before 2 PM. When I drove this morning at 8 o'clock, skies were perfectly clear (i.e. no contrails, nor clouds of any kind). At 3 PM driving home, lots of high cirrus. So it seems logical that the contrails began to form just prior to the cirrus layers moving in.

High pressure ridge East of the LA area, this is pushing hot desert winds into the region...upper-level clouds can also flow in as well.

 

[M Bornong]

Here's a panorama view of that contrail. The sun was in the south, the shadow was in the north. So it's rather unintuitive as to why it casts a shadow. This is why you get people saying "it's not a shadow, it was nowhere near the sun".


And a video

We didn't see the conditions for contrail formation until about 3:00 pm, a little farther north in Bakersfield, it wasn't until around 5 that we had persistence, it made for a nice sunset. It was sad to see so many threads like this throughout the day.

 

[Trailspotter]

On October 12, 2014 at about 18:10 BST these three guys flew from the north right above my head and turned toward London. Unfortunately, they hid behind the clouds before I got my camera.

They did not show on FR24 and probably were military aircraft, despite flying in the airspace usually used by passenger jets. Later I found on Flickr other photographs of apparently the same planes taken in Lincolnshire (?)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/andyshotts/15240905427/
and Southeast London
https://www.flickr.com/photos/boxley/15234860158/

Update: I've asked the author of the former, it actually was taken near Stansted Airport, half way between my location and London.

 

[WeedWhacker]

Today at 14:00 PDT (Pacific Daylight Time, USA) which is currently -7UTC. (4 October, 2014). A "heat-wave" in Southern California, again this relates to the temperatures ON THE GROUND, and NOT to temperatures many thousands of feet above. This is part of why knowing some meteorology is useful, to aid in understanding of Earth's atmospheric systems.

Out at the pool...seated, facing approximately North-by-Northeast...first 3 in succession, left-to-right (no wide-angle lens). Geographical coordinates are roughly 33°.76"N 118°.36"W:

(Aw, "SNAP"! Sorry everyone. I tried to upload directly from my digital Sony camera. What went wrong?).

OK...what I did was DL all the pics from the Sony memory card to my hardrive....BRB...

MAYBE those are the same ones, Mick.... I am just NOT understanding how to link pics from my Sony "SuperSteadyShot with 12x Optical Zoom" (ETC) when I plug in the USB cord, and try to access it, from the memory, to post online.

 

[Mick West]

Today at 14:00 PDT (Pacific Daylight Time, USA) which is currently -7UTC.

Out at the pool...seated, facing approximately North-by-Northeast...first 3 in succession, left-to-right (no wide-angle lens). Geographical coordinates are roughly 33°.76"N 118°.36"W:

(Aw, "SNAP"! Sorry everyone. I tried to upload directly from my digital Sony camera. What went wrong?).

I might have photographed the same ones just now

 

[Mick West]

(Aw, "SNAP"! Sorry everyone. I tried to upload directly from my digital Sony camera. What went wrong?).

Need to wait until it finished uploading. Raw images are large, and take a while.

 

[Mick West]

So my crossing Jets were possibly:

North to South, UAL475, San Francisco to San Diego



East to West: AAL5, Dallas to Hawaii (Honolulu), also at 34,000 ft.

 

[Mick West]

Hawaii traffic has always made the most interesting contrail over Los Angeles. There's a couple more flights heading this way. US429 and US694

 

[WeedWhacker]

Hawaii traffic has always made the most interesting contrail over Los Angeles.

That's true. Not just to Hawai'i, but generally it is so.

Here....the Oceanic Routes that are "anchored" from California:

http://skyvector.com/?ll=33.190432477515785,-120.0690307609735&chart=304&zoom=4

If you look west, you will see (outside the ADIZ) some waypoints. "AUDIA", "DINTY", "ELKEY" and "FICKY" (for example). There are very commonly-used routes TO (and from, depending on the arrows) Hawai'i....we usually called them the "A, B. C, D, E or F" routes....EVERY waypoint name on these routes will begin with the same letter. I see that since my experience, this might not always be the case...the same first letter, I mean. Interesting.....of course, times change.

Of course, there are a great many OTHER Oceanic routes that airplanes can take, once they "Coast-Out". But that is the key....the "Coast-Out point is defined by the Flight Plan, and ATC requirements. (After you "Coast-Out" you are "feet wet"...this is a military term, mostly).

 

[Jason]

I was at my son's soccer practice yesterday and the contrails were amazing. The longest I've ever seen them. From horizon to horizon. I couldn't capture the full effect because the sun was setting in the direction of the contrails. Soccer practice is an hour and a half long, and the contrails were persistent almost the entire time. One minute they were there and that at roughly 1 and 20 minutes they just disappeared. I turned my back to push my daughter on the swing, and then it was gone all in a matter a few minutes.

Sorry about the broken external images. The photos do open when you click on the links. I'm pretty new at this uploading photos stuff, and I wish I knew how to make a collage showing the progression of the contrails forming and persisting

[Broken links removed]

 

[WeedWhacker]

I was at my son's soccer practice yesterday...[snip]...And then "poof" they were gone in an instant

Jason, I have not yet looked at all of them but I will surmise if we took just a bit of time to research, based on location and EXIF time data (your camera's clock was set to local time, I hope!!) then finding the identity of each flight will be easy/peasey.

 

[Gunguy45]

Uhhh, I'm getting a 403 error when I click a pic. It seems like that may be a mail server or something?

 

[Leifer]

Early morning......Marina del Rey.
High cirrus clouds, in a unique feathery cross-hatch pattern.
Plane trails burned through -- and replaced with the engine's own iced trails.....

 

[Leifer]

Early morning......Marina del Rey.
High cirrus clouds, in a unique feathery cross-hatch pattern.
Plane trails burned through -- and replaced with the engine's own iced trails.....

 

[Trailblazer]

I was at my son's soccer practice yesterday and the contrails were amazing. The longest I've ever seen them. From horizon to horizon. I couldn't capture the full effect because the sun was setting in the direction of the contrails. Soccer practice is an hour and a half long, and the contrails were persistent almost the entire time. One minute they were there and that at roughly 1 and 20 minutes they just disappeared. I turned my back to push my daughter on the swing, and then it was gone all in a matter a few minutes.

Sorry about the broken external images. The photos do open when you click on the links. I'm pretty new at this uploading photos stuff, and I wish I knew how to make a collage showing the progression of the contrails forming and persisting

[Broken links removed]

You're in New Jersey, right? Assuming you mean Tuesday evening, then the conditions looked ideal for contrails. This snapshot is 5pm Eastern time:



There was a wedge of cold and moist air coming down from the north over the Eastern US at that time.

(Maps from http://www.instantweathermaps.com/)

Sorry if this post is not strictly on topic. Maybe we need a thread devoted to correlating contrail pics with weather conditions?

 

[Jason]

[Broken links removed]

 

[Jason]

You're in New Jersey, right? Assuming you mean Tuesday evening, then the conditions looked ideal for contrails. This snapshot is 5pm Eastern time:



There was a wedge of cold and moist air coming down from the north over the Eastern US at that time.

(Maps from http://www.instantweathermaps.com/)

Sorry if this post is not strictly on topic. Maybe we need a thread devoted to correlating contrail pics with weather conditions?

Right above my head it was blue skies, and planes were flying over head as well. They produced contrails that lasted only seconds. But to the west over the tree line is were the contrails were persisting for almost the entire length of my sons soccer practice (1hr 30 min). One minute they were there, and the next minute poof they were gone. Sorry if some of the above photos are out of order, I tried uploading them originally and then deleted them from my phone after doing so. So I had no reference besides the file I created..

 

[Jason]

@Trailblazer I circled the location of where I live below from the weather map you attached above. I'm assuming the contrails formed right on the border where the light green meets the dark green. I was looking west, from the Jersey shore (about 10 miles in land) in Manahawkin NJ. But there was actually a patch of clear blue sky right over my head in these photos. It was between 530pm and 700pm

 

[deirdre]

circled the location of where I live below from the weather map you attached above. I'm assuming the contrails formed right on the border where the light green meets the dark green. I was looking west, from the Jersey shore (about 10 miles in land) in Manahawkin NJ. But there was actually a patch of clear blue sky right over my head in these photos. It was between 530pm and 700pm

nice photos. I don't know if I would call that horizon to horizon though (I've always wondered with all our trees and mountains/hills, how one figures out where the horizon really is!)

 

[TEEJ]

On October 12, 2014 at about 18:10 BST these three guys flew from the north right above my head and turned toward London. Unfortunately, they hid behind the clouds before I got my camera.

They did not show on FR24 and probably were military aircraft, despite flying in the airspace usually used by passenger jets. Later I found on Flickr other photographs of apparently the same planes taken in Lincolnshire (?)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/andyshotts/15240905427/
and Southeast London
https://www.flickr.com/photos/boxley/15234860158/

Update: I've asked the author of the former, it actually was taken near Stansted Airport, half way between my location and London.

Nice catch on this activity. They were 3 RAF Eurofighter Typhoons operating from RAF Coningsby, Lincolnshire. Call sign was Razor flight. Monitored by aircraft enthusiasts in the UK on radio scanners and Plane Plotter. They were returning from a training sortie with an air-to-air refuelling tanker and refuelled south of the Isle of Wight in the English Channel. Two of the Typhoon serials were ZK327 and ZK330

 

[deirdre]

 

[Jason]

nice photos. I don't know if I would call that horizon to horizon though (I've always wondered with all our trees and mountains/hills, how one figures out where the horizon really is!)

The sun made it hard to see because I couldn't zoom in. The contrail did cover the entire "line of sight" though from left to right. There were trees to the right and the photos I took didn't really show the contrail in great detail. So lets say it was about 80 to 90% of the horizon. Still though, it was the longest contrail I've ever seen, and it persisted for over an hour, and then just vanished in the blink of an eye. Really cool... I wish I knew how to time lapse them to give it a better effect. I ended up taking close to 40 photos of it..

 

[Jason]

Very nice shot Dee. I like the scenic shot too in the second photo. Looks like an old wooden bridge. Must be a nice place to visit

 

[Trailspotter]

From a recent trip down memory lane.

Sunrise in Heathrow.


Lenin lives and breathes out contrails.

(A plane from Crimea to Moscow flies around Ukraine and the Donbas region)


Russian Mil Mi-17 "Hip" helicopter flying over.

 

[Trailspotter]

There was a calm morning today after ex-hurricane Gonzalo battered us yesterday. A passing contrail revealed a clear air turbulence with initial contortions having evolved into a Kelvin-Helmholtz wave:


It was puzzling that this turbulence appeared to be localized in a small area compared to that occupied by cirrus clouds with ripples, but then I found an explanation: it was not a level flight. SAS802 from LHT to OSL was still climbing up to cross the North Sea at FL410:

Its contrail probably crossed at some point the unstable boundary between the two layers moving with very different velocities.

 

[MikeC]

Here's a photo I took through my windscreen last night - the a/c is highlighted because it's a bit indistinct - but this is Air NZ flight ANZ548 flying Christchurch - Auckland at about 07.45pm local time shot from Lower Hutt - facing west - so it is flying over the South Taranaki Bight to the west of Wellington.

The point here is that this aircraft has left a persistent contrail ("top one" to the left), and is currently leaving a non-persistent one - it is a multi-tasking chemtrailer!!

The 2nd persistent contrail on the left (the "bottom" one) was probably left by ANZ674 which flew by 30 minutes earlier from Dunedin to Auckland.

 

[Leifer]

How about cloud images I painted myself ? (this the right place ?)

.....these skies were not copied from photos, but the inspiration for them was from photos of real clouds.

 

[Leifer]

I believe these formations are called, 'cirrostratus fibratus'

 

[Trailblazer]

Here's a photo I took through my windscreen last night - the a/c is highlighted because it's a bit indistinct - but this is Air NZ flight ANZ548 flying Christchurch - Auckland at about 07.45pm local time shot from Lower Hutt - facing west - so it is flying over the South Taranaki Bight to the west of Wellington.

The point here is that this aircraft has left a persistent contrail ("top one" to the left), and is currently leaving a non-persistent one - it is a multi-tasking chemtrailer!!

The 2nd persistent contrail on the left (the "bottom" one) was probably left by ANZ674 which flew by 30 minutes earlier from Dunedin to Auckland.

Looking at the tracks of those flights, the planes must have been round about 60 miles (100km) from you at the closest, possibly a bit more.