On my first flight today, I managed to catch a glimpse of a nearly full moon (Waning Gibbous, 96% visible) on the departure out of Raleigh. This past Friday was a rare occurrence of a Harvest moon and an Eclipse, so I was excited to see it from the sky.
I used FlightAware’s tracklog feature to correlate the times of the pictures to the approximate locations and altitudes (approximate because as the photos weren’t taken at the exact same time the plane reported in). There is a lot of information available with the tracklog, but I only captured the first few columns. I put this information under each of the pictures:
- Time (EDT)
- Latitude
- Longitude
- Course
- Direction (Heading vs. Course vs. Direction)
- Speed (Knots)
- Speed (Miles Per Hour)
- Altitude (Feet)
Ever wonder what a city looks like when completely covered by clouds?
| Sun 06:33:24 AM | 36.0083 | -78.8083 | 283° | West | 260 | 299 | 5,200 |
At just under 15,000 feet, I managed to catch a glimpse of the moon!
| Sun 06:38:28 AM | 36.1653 | -79.2789 | 318° | Northwest | 366 | 421 | 14,600 |
As the flight went on, I noticed that we could see hints of sunrise in the sky, which was beautiful. This is why I love to fly!
And another shot of the moon with the sunrise hues at 32k feet.
| Sun 06:54:25 AM | 37.4447 | -81.0061 | 327° | Northwest | 449 | 517 | 32,000 |