GREAT picture!!

My friend Sandi sent me this. I thought you might like it, too.

GREAT picture!!
< Please read all this first before opening up the picture. This is pretty
< cool! Be sure to read the explanation below before looking at the
attached
< picture. You can't really appreciate the picture without knowing what it
is
< exactly. This isn't a joke, so don't expect a punchline or strange/funny
< picture.
< Through the viewfinder of his camera, Ensign John Gay could see the
fighter
< plane drop from the sky heading toward the port side of the aircraft
carrier
< Constellation. At 1,000 feet, the pilot drops the F/A-18C Hornet to
increase
< his speed to 750 mph, vapor flickering off the curved surfaces of the
plane.
< In the precise moment a cloud in the shape of a farm-fresh egg forms
around
< the Hornet 200 yards from the carrier,its engines rippling the Pacific
Ocean
< just 75 feet below, Gay hears an explosion and snaps his camera shutter
once.
< "I clicked the same time I heard the boom, and I knew I had it", Gay
said.
< What he had was a technically meticulous depiction of the sound barrier
being
< broken July7,1999, somewhere on the Pacific between Hawaii and Japan.
< Sports Illustrated, Brills Content, and Life ran the photo. The photo
< recently took first prize in the science and technology division in the
World
< Press Photo 2000 contest, which drew more than 42,000 entries worldwide.
< "All of a sudden, in the last few days,I've been getting calls from
< everywhere about it again. It's kind of neat, " he said, in a telephone
< interview from his station in Virginia Beach, VA.
< A naval veteran of 12 years, Gay, 38, manages a crew of eight assigned to
< take intelligence photographs from the high-tech belly of an F-14Tomcat,a
< Joint Task Force Exercise as the Constellation made its way to Japan.
< Gay selected his Nikon 90 S, one of the five 35 mm cameras he owns. He
set
< his
< 80-300 mm zoom lens on 300 mm, set his shutter speed at 1/1000 of a second
< with an aperture setting of F5.6. "I put it on full manual, focus and
< exposure," Gay said. "I tell young photographers who are into automatic
< everything, you aren't going to get that shot on auto. The plane is too
< fast. The camera can't keep up."
< At sea level a plane must exceed 741 mph to break the sound barrier, or
the
< speed at which sound travels. The change in pressure as the plane outruns
< all of the pressure and sound waves in front of it is heard on the ground
as
< an explosion or sonic boom. The pressure change condenses the water in
the
< air as the jet passes these waves. Altitude, wind speed,humidity, the
shape
< and trajectory of the plane - all of these affect the breaking of this
< barrier. The slightest drag or atmospheric pull on the plane shatters the
< vapor oval like fireworks as the plane passes through,he said everything
on
< July 7 was perfect. "You see this vapor flicker around the plane that
gets
< bigger and bigger. You get this loud boom, and it's instantaneous. The
< vapor cloud is there, and then it's not there.
< It's the coolest thing you have ever seen."
< Now open the picture.

- CLOUD.jpg