The Moon at 30,000 Feet

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:

Ever wonder what a city looks like when completely covered by clouds?

Durham, NC
Durham, NC

2016-09-18-location01

Sun 06:33:24 AM36.0083-78.8083283°West2602995,200

At just under 15,000 feet, I managed to catch a glimpse of the moon!

2016-09-18-moonovernc
Moon, or cold sun?

2016-09-18-location02

Sun 06:38:28 AM36.1653-79.2789318°Northwest36642114,600

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!

Sunrise over VA
Sunrise over VA

And another shot of the moon with the sunrise hues at 32k feet.

Sunrise with a moon!
Sunrise with a moon!

2016-09-18-location03

Sun 06:54:25 AM37.4447-81.0061327°Northwest44951732,000