con trails and rings around the moon

[Polly Gnome]

During the last full moon, on a frosty night, there was an absolutely enormous ring around the moon.

As an aircraft approached the ring, you could see its con trail. As it 'entered' the ring, the contrail disappeared and you could just see the aircraft's lights.

Does anyone know why?

[Tinstaafl]

The pilot switched off the chemtrail so it's chemical content couldn't be determined using spectroscopy & the moon's light that would have shone through it. :suspect:


:E :E :E

[Quidnunc]

Polly.

Here's a picture and explanation.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap000515.html

It is awsome to see.

[Groundbased]

Speaking of contrails, we've had a couple of fantastic clear days here in the UK, (where I am anyway), and its struck me that some contrails seem to hang around for ages whilst others disappear much more quickly. Is this the effect of different temperatures at different altitudes?

[av8boy]

All sorts of atmospheric and mechanical reasons, actually. Where I live I can see a lot of sky, and because of standard routing in and out of some very large airports within 100 miles, it is not difficult to estimate the altitude of an aircraft genertating a contrail (you know, as in "the ones over there are almost always aircraft on the 'X' profile to 'KXXX' and the ones over there are almost always on the 'Y' Departure, 'Z' Transition..."). And this is what really makes the game more fun...

For instance, a couple of days ago I noted that, just after sunrise, some of the contrails on the inbound tracks were unbroken for 40 or 50 miles, then all of them disappeared for 15 or so miles and then reappeared. Checking conditions aloft (using the Java tools at http://adds.aviationweather.noaa.gov/ ), the no-contrail area obviously corresponded with a lower-humidity, higher temp zone which the aircraft were descending through, but which wasn't very thick. Like a light switch, the contrails stopped and started at the edges of this area.

I've been fascinated with this subject for a long time and I've accumulated a bunch of info. What makes it even more fun is the fact that the father of a friend of my is a believer in the chem-trails theory. Nut.

Anyway, there are some pretty good sites on this you can visit. NASA has a page which predicts conditions for contrail formation in real time at http://www-pm.larc.nasa.gov/sass/contrail_forecast/contrail_prediction.html and there are lots of links at RESOURCE NOTES ON JET CONTRAILS AND ASSOCIATED ITEMS (http://www.astro.ku.dk/~holger/IDA/notes.html#19a)

A long time ago I saw a study which was undertaken by (I believe) the US Army. In this study they had people just watch the sky for contrails and make detailed notes about what they saw and when they saw it. Then they looked at conditions aloft, etc, and tried to make sense of when contrails could be expected. For the life of me I can't find it now. If anybody has a link, I'd sure like to see it again.

Dave

[Nozzles]

Polly,

The 'Moon Dog' ring is quite common when there are ice crystals in the upper atmosphere. My personal theory as to why the contrail was invisible inside the moon dog is this:
The area inside the moon dog is brighter than the surrounding sky, due to the refraction of the moon's light. I suspect that your eyes were unable to see the fine contrail it due to the bright background. For similar reasons we don't notice the planet Mercury during the daytime-its reflected light is simply drowned out by the glare of the sun. However, as soon as the sun sets, there he is, low on the horizon. Had the contrail passed directly in front of the moon, I suggest you would have seen it's silhouette.

As an aside-av8boy, what the hell is this chem-trails theory?

[Tinstaafl]

It's not a theory! It's a fact! Just ask the chem-trailers, they'll tell you... :suspect:

[av8boy]

The basic premise, as I understand it, is that "them ain't naturally occurring contrails up there." This exchange may shed a little light:

My friend's dad (MFD): "Those things you say are contrails are really evidence that the government is spraying us with chemicals or biological agents."

Me: "What? Are you saying that the government is putting these things in aircraft fuel or something and that aircraft operators are unaware that they are doing this? Or are you saying that aircraft operators ARE aware and complicit in this dastardly deed?"

MFD: "Neither. I'm saying that those so called 'contrails' are coming from government aircraft flown by government pilots."

Me: "Whoa whoa whoa... So, as we look up at the sky right now and see some 20 or 30 contrails, you're saying that those are all government aircraft spraying secret mind-control drugs or viri on us?"

MFD: "Well, most of them. Absolutely."

Me: "Have you ever visited an ATC facility? You know you might go right down the road here and do just that and you could see that each of those contrail-generating aircraft are associated with a RADAR target with a name like 'Delta' or 'United.' What's more, you could get a scanner and listen to them. They're commercial flights."

MFD: That's part of the scam. The government aircraft PRETEND to be commercial aircraft when they talk to ATC."

Me: "OK. How about this: get a pair of binoculars and take a look at the aircraft generating the contrail. You can often make out the company paint just that simply."

MFD: That just proves how insidious they are. They paint their aircraft like regular commercial aircraft."

Me: "OK. How about this. Get some people you trust together. I'll show you where to station them at the airport and along the flight path until one of these aircraft get to altitude. They can watch passengers board, watch the pushback, climb, etc. It will then be obvious that the aircraft isn't a 'black-ops' aircraft, right?"

MFD: "I'm not saying that commercial aircraft NEVER create contrails. Sure, if we did that we'd know that that one WAS a commercial aircraft. However, it wouldn't do anything to show that the other aircraft--the ones actually dropping barium or flu virus--were commercial aircraft."

Me: "You're a nut."


There are a number of websites devoted to perpetuating this myth, and a number devoted to debunking it. Here are just a few. You can go ahead and figure out which is which.


http://www.chemtrailcentral.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/000125.html
http://supercell.org/youdecide.html
http://worldzone.net/international/chickiedeb/
http://www.borderlands.com/contrails/contrail.htm

Of course, I've got to wonder why they're wasting so much chemistry over places like Coaldale and Winnemucca, Nevada... On the other hand, perhaps the fact that they're wasteful PROVES it's a government project...

;)

Dave

[Nozzles]

Well now I know

LOL:8

[Bre901]

I once saw an anti-contrail.

I was hiking in the mountains just NW of GVA. The wind was from NW and there was a nice (not very thick) lenticular cloud downwind from the ridge.

An airliner flew accross the cloud, roughly perpendicularly to the wind direction, not far from the leading edge. The wake of the plane actually vaporized the water so that the cloud was cut by a blue band. This band remained in the cloud, drifting downwind until it disapeared at the trailing edge of the cloud. The whole phenomenon lasted for something like 15 minutes.

This gives an idea of how long the wake of a heavy can persist in stable (i.e. non turbulent) conditions

[Nozzles]

When I'm bored, I love 'ski-ing' on a flat undercast, then doing a half-loop to look back on the gouge I've carved in the cloud.

[JustaFew]

Couple of weeks ago, I saw a partial ring around the sun - a par helion? Nothing unusual. The ring corresponded to the sun as the centre. However, another partial ring was also present above the sun placing the sun outside the ring. So the sun wasn't causing the higher ring, and the moon wasn't present to be the centre. Baffling.
Any ideas???