AERIAL PHOTO:

 

 THE ATTACHED PICTURE IS REALLY ONE OF THE MOST INTRIGUING THAT YOU'VE EVER SEEN.  READ THE EXPLANATION BEFORE LOOKING AT THE PICTURE.  FOR THOSE OF  YOU WHO LIKE AIRCRAFT, THIS IS SOMETHING.

 

 Through the viewfinder of his camera, Ensign John Gay could see the  fighter plane drop from the sky heading toward the port side of the aircraft carrier Constellation.  At 1,000 feet, the pilot drops the F/A_18C Hornet to increase his speed to 750 mph, vapor  flickering off the curved surfaces of  the plane.  In the precise moment a cloud in the shape of a farm_fresh egg  forms around the Hornet 200 yards from the carrier, its engines rippling the Pacific Ocean just 75 feet below, Gay hears an explosion and snaps his camera shutter once. "I clicked the same time I heard the boom, and I knew I had it," Gay said. What he had was a technically meticulous depiction of the sound barrier being broken July 7, 1999, somewhere on the Pacific between  Hawaii and Japan.

 

Sports Illustrated, Brills Content and Life ran the photo. The photo  recently took first prize in the science and technology division in the  World Press Photo 2000 contest, which drew more than 42,000 entries worldwide.

 

"All of a sudden, in the last few days, I've been getting calls from  everywhere about it again.  It's kind of neat," he said, in a telephone  interview from his station in Virginia Beach, Va.   A naval veteran of 12 years, Gay, 38, manages a crew of eight assigned  to  take intelligence photographs from the high_tech belly of an F_14 Tomcat,  the fastest fighter in the U.S.  Navy. In July, Gay had been part of a  Joint  Task Force Exercise as the Constellation made its way to Japan.

 

 Gay selected his Nikon 90 S, one of the five 35 mm cameras he owns.  He set his  80_300 mm zoom lens on 300 mm, set his shutter speed at 1/1000 of a second with an aperture setting f F5.6.  "I put it on full manual, focus and  exposure," Gay said.  "I tell young photographers who are into automatic everything, you aren't going to get that shot on auto. The plane is too  fast. The camera can't keep up."

 

At sea level a plane must exceed 741  mph to break the sound barrier, or the speed at which sound travels.  The change in  pressure as the plane outruns all of the pressure and sound waves in  front of it is heard on the ground as an explosion or sonic boom. The pressure change condenses the water in the air as the jet passes these waves.  Altitude, wind speed, humidity, the shape and trajectory of the plane _  all of these affect the breaking of this barrier. The slightest drag or atmospheric pull on the plane shatters the vapor oval like fireworks as the  plane passes through, he said everything on July 7 was perfect, he said.

 

"You see this vapor flicker around the plane that gets bigger and bigger.  You get this loud boom, and it's instantaneous. The vapor cloud is there,  and then it's not there. It's the coolest thing you have ever seen."