Read Me First

Please read all this before checking out 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. As the explanation

says at the beginning, 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 US Navy 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 of breaking the sound barrier, a cloud in the shape

of a farm-fresh egg forms arourd the Hornet 200 yards from the

carrier, its engines rippling the Pacific Ocean just 75 feet below,

Gay hears the explosion/sonic boom 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 on July 7, 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. And because Ens. Gay is a member of

the military he was ineligible for the cash prize.

"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-14 Tomcat, the fastest fighter in the U.S. Navy.

In July, Gay had been part of a Joint TaskForce 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 will shatter 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

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