4/11/2015 7AM As a
line and formation of commercial jets cross Lake Michigan tracking toward our
general flyway in Central Wisconsin, I rush through my basic procedure of
analysis to formulate today's aviaticus cloud forecast before these craft come
into view. If any contrails are viewable
today, they only should be of short length and duration but overall we should
see no aviaticus clouds this morning or this afternoon.
Update: 7:00-7:30AM All traffic along the west-East
flyway displayed short duration needle
-like aviaticus clouds. All traffic was between 35-36000' with the exception of one
flight at 26000 and climbing that displayed no trail.
How to
Spot Aircraft that are not Sporting Contrails
First learn the flight patterns in your area. To do this I ended up using Flightradar24 site. This was recommended by Mick West and others from Metabunk. I
use it on laptop, desktop and iPad.
With normal vision
it is quite easy to spot aircraft above 30000' if they are trailing even a
short whiff of white. But at times
aircraft will streak out a trail between 35-36000' and none at 34,000'. Or even
depending on location some aircraft within the same elevation range will trail
but others will not.
Years ago I learned
some methods of improving vision as I used to wear glasses and wanted to
explore the possibility of improving my vision after my optometrist
emphatically told me 'there is nothing you can do.' (Other than wear glasses!)
He was wrong. One exercise I began was
viewing 3 dimensional sterograms. Most
people are familiar with these. You lazily stare at a picture and suddenly
objects appear in 3D that were not visible in the 2D format.
When we scan a
completely blue sky we are only focusing right in front of our face and not 7 miles away. Changing focus to that range is difficult
because there is no reference point so we do not perceive we are just scanning
an area in front of our noses. Hold up
one finger at arms length in front of your face and focus on it and you see a
single finger, now with the finger still in view look beyond it to the open
sky, you will see two fingers though you are not focusing on them, you are
looking beyond them, your individual eyes have actually separated (diverged)and you are
focusing out and have a better change of spotting a trailess aircraft.
Binoculars work as
well of course but you'll want to pre-focus on a distant object otherwise you
may doing an out of focus scan just as with the naked eye. This morning the moon was visible so I used
that to set my focus. Sill you should
know the approximate location of aircraft and this is where I use the flight
tracker. With an inexpensive app, high altitude aircraft can be approximately
located by scanning the sky with the iPad camera. I prefer the iPad because of the large
screen. Most aircraft are actually ahead
of where they are plotted on the iPad screen simply because of information
transmission delays. So if you spot an
aircraft on a flight tracker screen that is 20 miles away, start scanning the
sky at it may already be passing by or down range. I love practicing without binoculars when there is time. Great exercise for the eyes.
The first arrival this morning while I was using the focus method, easy to spot though as it was trailing an aviaticus whiff:
http://theorioninitiative2.blogspot.com/2015/04/contrail-forecast-for-central-wisconsin.html
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