Transients — Aircraft
A 10-minute stack from the Ecliptic Camera looking south. I thought this long streak was a meteor, but it's Ryanair flight RYR8BT, a Boeing 737-800 (9H-QAD, flown by Malta Air for Ryanair), descending from 12,700 to 11,000 feet at about 310 knots on its way into Stansted, where it landed at 01:13. It passed within 3 km of the camera, and the curve at the bottom is it swinging round as it came almost overhead. Where it came from isn't in the flight data we have; it was heading north near Gatwick when the recording starts.
The trail runs across two consecutive 60 second exposures, and a meteor lasts less than a second. It shows the same faint dashing as the anti-collision strobes on the TUI flight an hour later. The ADS-B flight history from adsb.fi puts RYR8BT at a bearing of 188 degrees and 14 degrees up at 00:01 UTC, within about 2 degrees of the lower end of the trail. The sun was 39 degrees below the horizon, too dark for a satellite.
A 10-minute stack from the Ecliptic Camera looking south. What looks like a very long meteor is an airliner, TUI flight TOM19V, a Boeing 737-800 (G-TAWX), descending from 10,100 to 8,600 feet at about 370 knots on its way into Stansted. It came up over western France from the south, probably from Spain or the Balearics; the flight data doesn't say which. It stayed on the same compass bearing, 198 degrees, for the whole two minutes while rising from 6 to 43 degrees above the horizon, because it was flying almost straight towards the camera. That is why the trail is vertical.
The trail runs across two consecutive 60 second exposures, and a meteor lasts less than a second. The top of the trail is a regular train of double dashes, the anti-collision strobes, and the solid, brightening lower part is the landing lights coming towards us. The ADS-B flight history from adsb.fi puts TOM19V exactly there between 00:51 and 00:53 UTC. It can't be a satellite either: the sun was 39 degrees below the horizon, and satellites don't flash.
A 60-second exposure of an airliner viewed from 9 miles south of Heathrow airport. Heathrow's runways run East-West, but this aircraft is captured in a sweeping turn we calculate to be about 320 mph (280 knots). That speed and rapid turn rate point to climbing out on its departure route, rather than a slow, straight-in landing approach. The steady headlights - landing lights as they are called - leave parallel rails, while the synchronized 1-second anti-collision strobes map out the plane's true orientation in 3D space.
The gap between the tracks of the lights is 7 pixels, which at this part of the lens is 0.13 degrees — about a quarter of the width of the full Moon. An A320, for example, has a wingspan of 36 metres, which is how we worked out the speed.
The strobe flashes appear every 23 pixels along the trail, exactly once per second, at the same time, exhibiting the signature Airbus-style double-flash pattern. The lights are on the wingtips and tail top, the latter visible between the continuous landing lights. This shows us how the plane is orientated with repect to our viewpoint. The position of the lights suggests a narrow bodied jet rather than a wide one - almost certainly the ubiquitous A320.
The altitude of the plane is about 15,000 feet, 3 miles/5km so it has climbed at a good rate of 3,000 feet per minute and an angle of ascent of about 6 degrees. These are typical values for a plane climbing out of an airport.