Thread: What's going on here then?

Can anyone work out what's going on in this picture?

I'll post the rest in the series and the relevant media links when guessed.

Bee-Utey has it.

The photo was from the flight deck of a charter flight chasing a total solar eclipse two years ago east of Tahiti There was a lot of work into matching the aircraft's flight path and turning radii with the path of the eclipse. We ended up with a 9 minute 23 second total solar eclipse which is two minutes longer than ever possible from the ground. We had forty passengers in the Airbus 319, all seated on one side so they could crowd around the other side windows unobstructed.

I had the list of the lat/long and times that we needed to be in space where the eclipse shadow was the slowest according to the NASA calculations and then wrote a spreadsheet program to work out the speed and the radius of the turns so that we could fly at 90 degrees to the eclipse and watch it approach, then just as it was approaching turn onto its track and let the shadow overtake us. Wings level on track was about 25 seconds before the 265km diameter umbral shadow travelling at 1500mph hit us so timing was perfect. Then it was balls to the wall (not that there is much leeway anyway at 37,000 feet) trying to stay in the shadow for as long as possible and we did until the shadow receded ahead of us nearly 9.5 minutes later.

Without doubt the most "stressful" flight I had flown - in perfect conditions - there was no second chance here....

Anyway here is the magazine article of it Longest Eclipse Ever: Airplane Chases the Moon's Shadow | Wired Science | Wired.com and here are some more photos. Solar Eclipse Flight 2010 - dancolborne's Photos