Wall of iPods -- Part Deux

The air was unusually smooth over the north eastern Pacific this morning, which allowed the contrails of preceding jets to stretch over hundreds of miles.

There are a few things worth noting about this picture (besides wondering how many iPods are in it):

If you look at the horizon, the contrails appear to curve. That is no illusion. The airplanes fly at constant altitude, so you are seeing the earth's curvature affect the airplanes' flight paths.

The airplanes are all flying GPS, so why are their tracks scattered all over the sky? That is an illusion. There was a roughly 30-knot wind on the right beam. To stay on the black line, the airplanes have to crab into the wind. Since the contrails stream directly in the airplanes' six 0'clock, what is apparently cross track error is really the cross wind component multiplied by the time since the jet's passing the camera's vantage point.

There are five contrails, plus one lower you can't see because the rising sun had not yet illuminated it.

By the way, in case you are still, which presumes you had ever started, wondering how many iPods that is, I worked it out precisely: a bloody lot.