2024 – Look Up!
…………………………………………..(ignore April 30, 2017 publish date – this was published on March 31, 2024)
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Sup………………..never mind – it’s a plane.
On five days so far this year, I saw streaks across the sky – some individual, some multiple. Is it something harmful or is it just due to atmospheric conditions?
Here’s Wikipedia’s explanation for these plumes/contrails:
Contrails or vapor trails are line-shaped clouds produced by aircraft engine exhaust or changes in air pressure, typically at aircraft cruising altitudes several miles above the Earth’s surface. They are composed primarily of water, in the form of ice crystals.
That sounds relatively harmless, but there seem to be differing views online about whether or not they’re detrimental to the environment.
I’m not here to discuss the merits of either view. I’m an observer/documenter and below is what I saw on those five days, mostly from home.
When you see these things, you might tend to think they’re all in the same space (I didn’t want to say “plane”) in the sky at the same time. Look at this “collision”:
How about this potential pileup?
(“But officer………I was blinded by the sun.”)
I took these two pictures two minutes apart. The first one looks south (while hanging out of my east-facing living room window – you can see the Manhattan skyscrapers in the lower left) and the second one was shot from my south-facing back room. They have the “X” plumes in common, plus a whole bunch of old ones, but I have no idea what the three little flareups to the left of the steeple’s base are:
The next two PANOs (click to enlarge) were taken from my LR picture window on February 15, exactly two hours apart and face east and southeast, respectively:
Lotsa traffic in that second one, but I’m really curious about the two diagonal plumes on the right. The initial inclination is to wonder if two planes were flying in tandem, but because their equidistant trails hiccup at the same point and show an equal amount of degradation, it was probably just one plane making two plumes.
The next two were taken on February 26. The first one was taken by the baseball field of a nearby park and the second one was probably taken from home:
Two images from March 1, 2024 – the first one is three shots of the same plane taken within a 42-second period while I zoomed in twice:
The second 3-1-24 shot was taken from a west-facing window, as a private jet approaches Teterboro Airport, while being (two-dimentionally) below an old plume:
Here are three pix taken during a 17-minute period on March 12, 2024, starting with plumes and a plane (with a lit-up underside) over the setting sun:
All of a sudden, three planes streaked across the sky simultaneously! This is ONE picture – not three:
About 45-seconds later, I took this shot of them passing the sunset (which contains many old streaks AND a distant streakless plane):
Lastly, we finish with a B&W that may be one of the three streaks, as a plane bound for Newark Airport – 20 miles south of here – prepares to cross it:
This just in!
I went out for a walk before I put this post together on 3-31-24 and as I approached the back of my building on my return, look what I saw right over my top-left apartment (click to enlarge):
I couldn’t ask for a better-timed closing shot.
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