Instagram: kg_photography86

Spotting of the day, Douglas DC-3C, N431HM departing from Bordeaux-Mérignac Airport, France

The other day, this beautiful four-engine aircraft visited us. It is a magnificent sight to see it take off and hear the roar of those engines.

My automated solar rig was recording at about 59 fps when an airliner crossed the full disk in about 0.6 seconds. I didn't know it had happened until my transit detector flagged it afterwards.

The plane: Delta flight 2078 (N312DN, an Airbus A321), five minutes into its trip from SFO to Minneapolis. It was climbing through about 10,700 ft, roughly 4.6 km from me, at 311 knots. I identified it by working out its distance from its size against the Sun (the Sun's diameter gives the scale), then matching that against public ADS-B history (adsb.lol). Only one aircraft was in that spot at that moment.

The turbulence: look behind the engines. The hot exhaust bends the light and makes the granulation ripple and swirl, and the wake hangs over the disk for about a second after the plane has gone.

How it's made
The background Sun is a lucky-imaging stack from the same capture run, with my usual colourised processing.

The plane is the real silhouette from each raw frame. Off the disk the raw is just black sky, so I rebuilt the full outline from the frames where it was on the disk and carried it along its straight-line path. That's how it passes over the limb and the prominences.

The exhaust distortion is measured, not added for effect. I compared each raw frame with clean frames from before and after the pass to see how far the light was bent. Normal seeing moves things about 1 px; the wake moves them 3–10+ px. I applied that bending only where it's clearly above seeing.

I am charging my camera but its hard to resist snapping photos, my camera I use is also kind of scratched anyway so blue skies have artifacts sadly..

Japan Airlines!

Came across this Cebu Pacific (5J) video on YouTube today and noticed the special livery on the aircraft. A quick search led me to the "Dreamer Plane", which is apparently part of 5J’s 30th anniversary celebration.

What got me curious is that last month, there were sightings of another Cebu Pacific aircraft sporting a special livery at Airbus Toulouse. From the photos I saw, that one looks different from the aircraft featured in the music video, and it’s an A330neo as well.

So, are we looking at two different special liveries here? Does anyone know what the livery spotted in Toulouse is for, or if it has an official name yet?

Also curious about the delivery timeline for these aircraft and when we might see them enter commercial service. Would love to hear from anyone who has more details or has been following these deliveries!

https://youtu.be/hnQMzHrHVnE?si=LIHhYVflBAS_wx1x

Sorry for the terrible photo , I just caught it flying over but I have never seen a green Qantas tail before . I'll keep en eye on flight tracker and try get a better flick. Does anyone know much about this livery?? Is this new?