Jennifer:
Great photo!! I work in aviation and you should really consider submitting that picture to Airliners.net. They collect photos of all types of aircraft and the folks who visit that site would appreciate the uniqueness of the A-10 pic you took. I say it would get voted one of the top pics of the month on that site.
And just to clarify, what you are seeing in this photo are not contrails. Contrails form when hot humid air from jet exhaust mixes with environmental air of low vapor pressure and low temperature. Instead, what you are actually seeing are wingtip vortices. As a wing flies through the air, it generates a low pressure zone on top of the wing. Fluids naturally flow from high to low pressure and the relatively high pressure air below the wing has a natural tendency to flow to the top of the wing. The air naturally cannot flow around the leading or trailing edge of the wing due to airspeed, but it can flow around the end. Consequently, air flows from below the wing, out around the edge to the top of the wing in a circular fashion. Since vortices cause a low-pressure area at their centre, sometimes water precipitates out to form clouds in the vortices allowing wingtip votices to be seen. This is most common on aircraft flying at high angles of attack, such as fighter aircraft pulling high G manouevres.
It was pretty awesome to see this A-10 yesterday. It certainly appears the pilot made the rounds of peaks. Nice that he (or she) gave us an aviation equivalent of “thumbs up” for our event and paid tribute to our raising of the flags.
