This is a real-time view of American Airlines flight 1837 traveling from Philadelphia, PA, to West Palm Beach Wednesday, July 20.

I've become a tad obsessed with the solar transits because they're more challenging to plan than the lunar transits. The solar filter blocks everything around the Sun, so you can't see the plane approaching (and staring even near the Sun isn't an option, lest you want to go blind permanently). And this also means it's pretty impossible to tell how far off the misses are. So, it's a lot of waiting for a plane to be in the general vicinity when the Sun is overhead, pointing the camera at the Sun, holding it there (yes, I'm handheld), "pray and spray," or waiting to see the plane pass in front of the Sun and hope I'm quick enough to snag it.

I snagged one about a month ago, but the plane was not nearby, and the Sun was low on the horizon, which meant the aircraft was passing at a relatively slow pace (2-seconds or so). Last weekend, I was reminded that the closer the planes are, the quicker they appear to move. This became painfully clear when I missed a 747 passing directly in front of the Sun, directly overhead, and in the time of a blink of the eye. By the time I hit the shutter button, it was long gone from the frame.

Thus emerged the obsession with cleansing from memory the missed shot. Because I was aiming for something overhead (so, many times closer than the earlier transit I snagged), I deployed the same hack we sometimes use with Space Station transit shots: video.

It's still the same inexact guessing game, but the workflow is better suited to success:
-Wait for the plane to be nearby (thank you, Flightradar24).
-Press record.
-Point the camera at the Sun for 1-minute.
-Repeat about 50-times until this (below) happens.

The total transit time was less than 1-second. I couldn't tell what I had gotten until I played it back frame-by-frame. The plane was much closer than I expected (so it fills the frame), and other than being slightly better centered, I couldn't have been much luckier.

I'm showing it here first in real-time speed, then slowed to 25% speed, then the finished image, a grab of one of the frames with some post-processing.

TL;DR: Jet airplanes are fast, the Sun is very bright, and you shouldn't look directly at it.

Tags:   WPI PHL Flightradar24 video Michael Seeley Mike Seeley Canon R5 R5 canon plane spotting Sun American Airlines airbus solar transit plane Florida

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At 7:29am (ET) Tuesday, October 6, 2020, SpaceX successfully launched another batch of Starlink communications satellites from Kennedy Space Center’s LC-39A.

This is the Falcon 9 rocket carrying the payload to orbit, seen from Titusville transiting the Sun shortly after sunrise.

Copyright Michael Seeley / We Report Space

Tags:   SpaceX ElonMusk Falcon9 Rocket Sun Solar Transit SolarTransit Starlink MikeSeeley MichaelSeeley Canon CanonR5 R5

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I realize this is now two United Launch Alliance launches old, but I just now got around to merging these photos into a sequence. I figure since it is Thursday I can sort of get away with posting this as a #TBT. (Although I realize 5 weeks isn't exactly a great #TB.)

This is a sequence of 13 images of the spectacular plume created by the #AtlasV #MUOS4 launch on September 2. The sequence spans nearly 2 minutes: the first frame is from 6:19:52 and the last is from 6:21:41. The first two frames are sort of a mess, as I was trying to figure out the exposure, but by the third frame I had it mostly figured out. (I was actually still in BULB and was triggering the shutter for about a second for each shot - the ultimate manual mode.)

Tags:   United Launch Alliance ULA ULALaunch Atlas V MUOS MUOS4 Cape Canaveral CCAFS Mike Seeley Michael Seeley Rocket Rocket Launch

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Video of the EFT1 Orion launch, shot from the roof of the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center the morning of December 5, 2014. Covered by Michael Seeley / SpaceFlight Insider.

Tags:   NASA Orion EFT EFT1 NextGiantLeap Kennedy Space Center Michael Seeley Mike

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A short video of the Orion Rollout and move to LC37, shot on November 11, 2014. This is how slowly it moves...it didn't make it to the pad until just after 3am the next morning.

Tags:   Orion NASA NextGiantLeap EFT1 Kennedy Space Center Michael Seeley Mike Seeley

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