Some of you may know that I am also a professional pilot. It pays the bills far better than being a photographer!
I consider myself extremely lucky and blessed to do two things that I absolutely love. It is not something that I take for granted or lightly.
One of the amazing things I get to experience as a pilot are sights that, on the ground, I and others don't get to see. A completely different perspective exists in flight. With the routes we fly at the altitudes we fly at, I witness things I never dreamt of as a kid . . . and I dreamt heaps growing up!
Obviously, the Earth is round. One of the fascinations for me are the various proofs of that fact. One this particular flight, we were approaching the International Date Line, above the Arctic Circle (we were approximately flying at 62 - 63 deg. North Lat. over the Bering Sea), flying at 43,000 feet (going off of memory here - wrong way altitude, but there was no one else out there and ATC had no issues with it), and the sun attempted to set at approximately 23.40 local time. Because the Earth is round, when the sun sets (or tries in this case to set as we were so far North), the Earth creates a shadow. If the moon was down range in the Earth's shadow, it would be called an Earth eclipse.
Because we were high enough in both altitude and latitude, Earth treated us to a prolonged view of her shadow. What a treat!
I shot these pictures off the aircraft's right side. These were shot in sequence with a few minutes in between each shot - one can see the shadow of the Earth engulfing us as the horizon masks more of the sun. It's something we never get to see on the ground. While I have seen it before flying, I haven't photographed it before.
OK . . . Enjoy, and thus endeth this geek lesson . . .