Nighttime Contrail

An aircraft path and its contrail (left) glows ghostly in the eastern sky of Marion, Iowa around 6:30 PM, December 22, 2010. A couple minutes earlier a faint meteor left a barely visible contrail in the same part of the sky. The reason for the illuminated contrails in this dark sky was the fact that a nearly full moon was just minutes away from peeking over the northeast horizon. The foreground is a former soybean field in the process of conversion to a housing development. The contrail at left is in the constellation Gemini. Low on the horizon at center is Orion and above Orion is Taurus. This is a 28-second exposure at f/5, 18mm focal length and 400 ISO.