Air Currents.

[jerrybilt]

While walking to the shed I noticed a condensation trail, from an aircraft, behaving badly ... it was straight but now is is an S-shape :

Then another "straight" contrail turned into an ellipse:

Looks like large complex eddies in the atmosphere.
BTW. The sky appears graded from L to R ... This is the effect of a circular polariser being used with a wide angle lens.

Jerry.

 

[starnovice]

Wow, wouldn't want to fly through that, definitely bumpy.

 

[jerrybilt]

My first thoughts look like a real guess but on second thoughts those pictures tell a story that, I guess, some people would not like being told! If we look at the information in the pictures and see what we can get out of it and get the answer to questions then we have a most interesting story.

oK, notice the sun in the top of the frame - we know the lat and lon of the camera and the time so we can tell ( with met data on " Skippy Sky " ) where the " cloud" was when it was when it was a " perfect" figure of 8. If we assume a high speed aircraft was on this traj. entering from the rhs and looking at the speed of the contrails expanding we can get a reasonable estimate of the position when that shape was first made. Sometime later the aircraft went on an elliptical traj.

Why was the aircraft making these manoeuvres ? That is the interesting story.