Posted April 30, 200817 yr hypnotic! staggering! :-o thx again to apod aka the fabulous astronomy picture of the day website: Explanation: What are these Earthlings going? Millions of people move about planet Earth by airplane every day. Hundreds of thousands of airplane flights take place over the US every day. A dramatic graphical depiction of these flights was created by Aaron Koblin and is shown above. Clicking on the above image (note: see the links below) will bring up a movie in many web browsers, a movie that might better be visible here. The movie depicts flight patterns that occurred over a few days in 2005 March. The count on the lower left shows the number of USA-related flights at the time listed on the lower right. The trails shown are not contrails but rather generated artificially by a computer algorithm. Major cities in North America and the USA are discernable. Inspection of the movie shows that some times of the day are busier than others, indicating that flights leave some destinations at times that are convenient for travelers. In terms of distance, flying to a distant location is much safer than driving to that location. Flying in an airplane, however, remains slightly more dangerous than driving to a nearby airport. clik to the flight animation video: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0804/flightpatterns_koblin.mov clik to the link: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080429.html
May 1, 200817 yr amazing how many flights are coming from Europe compared to Asia. Although I've never been to Asia, I've flown a couple of times to Europe in the last couple of years (the last trip was in March and my photos are available at http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php/topic,15600.0.html ) The density of air traffic between America and Europe in a narrow, arcing flight path over Nova Scotia and Ireland is pretty amazing. Check out this still photo I extracted from a video I shot from my Newark, NJ to Bristol, England flight. We were approaching the Irish coast at dawn when I noticed there were fresh contrails all around us. Then I spotted a flight paralleling ours to my right. And after I got home and extracted the still shot from the video, I discovered there was a third plane paralleling ours farther in the distance. Talk about rush hour! ... "In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage." -- John Steinbeck
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