Aeroplane spotting

The view

Zoomed into the path

Not being able to play the aeroplane game at Clapham Junction or Earlsfield just presently, on Saturday past off to Epsom Downs for a spot of aeroplane spotting from somewhere a little to the east of the 7th Furlong car park. Lighting conditions very good but I had forgotten to take the monocular so we had to struggle with naked eyes.

Unlike on the previous occasion, a few weeks ago, there were aeroplanes landing at Heathrow every few minutes or so. The airport was back in business, at least after a fashion. This being at about 1500 in the afternoon.

The aeroplanes were emerging from the big clump of trees right, then coasting down to the white speck in the centre of the second snap above, two tower blocks if you click to enlarge, after which I lost track of them. They were quite hard to see against the blue horizon and it would have been more or less impossible had they not caught the light and flashed from time to time.

The direction

Wanting to check the direction of Heathrow from the race course this morning, I found that Ordnance Survey, excellent though their maps are in other respects, were not up to gmaps for this particular job. I found that with a bit of hit and miss, a bit of clicking I could put a line of sight from about where we were sitting to Heathrow onto the gmap. Which, without getting a protractor out or doing something clever with the latitude and longitude, I estimate to be close enough to north west.

Given the short distance to the grandstand and the long distance to Heathrow, where exactly the latter was in relation to the former depended critically on where one was sitting, but I presently think that we were losing the aeroplanes well to the east of the runway, which must have been close to the grandstand from where we were actually sitting. Must try to remember the compass and the monocular next time.

PS: it is not just the Blogger people who are fiddling with their user interface, the Ordnance Survey are at it now as well, with names of places appearing in a strong black all over the map of England and Wales you get on entry. Don't think they have got it quite right yet; intrusive rather than informative.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/02/preludes-and-fugues.html. The aeroplane game, on this occasion from Balham, on my nearly new route to and from the Barbican.