Last night I was out with the Sky-90 and QHY-9 taking images of both the M8/20 region and Rho Ophiuchi.
I noticed tonight, when starting to stack images in Photoshop, that I had one frame with your typical trail of navigation lights though it... except that you can clearly see the tail of the aircraft as well as the front, it seems. However, the front section seems to have two jet engines hanging on where the cockpit should be. Weird! This was a 180-second (3 min) exposure, so I guess that the plane was caught as soon as the shutter on the QHY-9 opened.
See attached, where I've highlighted the areas involved.
The wing strobes light up the tail plane well in the RHS image. The under fuselage strobe lights up the motor in the second, but the second image of the wing strobes is not a bright and doesn't light up the tail plane so much... ???
Strange, no? LOL! Wing tip strobes first, then wing root. The tip strobes are reflecting off the leading edge of the horizontal stab in the first flash.
Could it be two navigation strobes on the aircraft flashing slightly out of sync? One lights the front of the aircraft, if flys a few metres forward and then then second strobe lights the rear.
Look carefully and you can also see what maybe a sattellite trail on the right hand side of the image.
Trail goes from top right to bottom middle thereabouts, through the right hand highlighted area.
What you caught is the underbelly stobe reflecting off the inside of the engine nacelles, easily seen if you go to the airport at night and look at aircraft taxiing.
Similar to what you see when I flew at night in choppers, the strobe reflected off the rotor blades and gave a similar appearance.
Yeah John - the wing tip strobes are reflected off the leading edges of the horizontal stab in the first instance and then, as you say, the centre strobe at the wing spar root lights the inboard nacelles. Pretty cool huh. I've caught many on my DSLR's over time, but until the CCD caught one I never saw the plane! Sensitivity?
The best one of these I have seen is with the actual engines lit up and you could see detail on the cowlings. It was on Cloudy nights several years ago now. It looked pretty awesome. Nice capture even if you did not actually want to Chris.
looks pretty cool 
