Going places

This week's Sky Watch simply shows what you might see unexpectedly when casting your eyes upwards. It is not unusual to see a vapour trail (or "contrail") as an airliner passes high overhead. It was rather surprising to see three in what appeared to be close proximity.

Of course, even though it looked as if these planes were close together, there would have been differences of thousands of feet vertically between them.

Planes fly fairly low across Ashton on their way to land at Manchester Airport. However, Ashton is also under several of the higher level air corridors. The plane to the right has most probably come from London and is heading towards North America over part of the Arctic. The two heading in the same direction may be heading for somewhere like Schiphol or Frankfurt.

A useful website which will show you where the planes you can see have come from and where they are going is flightradar24.com. When you look up and see planes flying in all directions, it is sometimes interesting to give a thought to the places where all those travellers are going!

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Sky Watch is a regular weekly feature on this photo blog. It links with websites all over the world with the general theme each week of looking upwards. Please take the opportunity to visit some of these other sites. I hope some new visitors have found their way here today, watching the skies!