On the 27th of July 2019 I was out to take photos and film the moonrise behind a tower called Arctura here in Östersund, Sweden. My setup was two camera, one Nikon D500 with my Nikon AF-S 600mm f/4 D IF-ED II lens filming in 4K and my Nikon D850 with a Nikon AF-S 300mm f/4E PF ED VR and Nikon AF-S TC-20E III teleconverter for still photos. When filming in 4K with my Nikon D500 I have a 2,25 crop factor so using it with my 600mm lens gives me an focal length equivalent of 1 350mm.
Here’s a photo of my setup with the Nikon D500 on the left and the Nikon D850 on the right.
A couple of minutes into the moonrise I noticed a very thin cloud in the preview of my still photos. I knew the sky was clear just minutes before so it caught my attention. A few seconds later a saw a small flashing light and realized that this was an airplane flying through my view. I quickly glanced at the LCD of my Nikon D500 and was happy to see that the airplane was inside my framing of the movie, sometimes you just get lucky.
Here’s a still photo from my Nikon D850 camera.
When returning home I did some study on what flight it was and it turned out to be an Boeing 787 Dreamliner flying from JFK in New York to Baku in Azerbajdzjan.
Here’s a screen shot from Flightradar24 showing the flight. Down to the left in the map you can see the city of Östersund where I was located. I measured the distance to around 200 km (124,27 miles) between me and the airplane.
Here’s a short movie showing the flyby as recorded by my Nikon D500. During the flyby the movie is in real-time, otherwise it’s speeded up to shorten the final movie.
