Boeing 737-700 (N7833A)

I went back again this morning to attempt to reshoot the five photos sequentially in the hopes of being able to get five pics correctly aligned for a merge, but unfortunately the smoke from two wildfires raging in CA has drifted over the Truckee Meadows and diminished the clarity of the sky over the airport and the city. So, no panorama.

Hi Gary!!
perfect panorama. made with a panoramic tripod head?
in the next time i'll build one by myself. here the heads are very expensive.400-500€ for a non professional one.
a good friend of me made such pictures with an professional one.
my first panoramic pic with my self made one will send to you.
greetings Uwe!

Nice job, Gary! Thanks!

Hi, Uwe. Hey, my friend, I appreciate the "5 *" vote, and it probably would have been worthy of a "5" ... if I had not reduced the final size of this in order to load it small enough so that the viewers don't have to scroll to see the entire pic. As it appears here, I know it isn't a ***** quality post. (But I thank you.)
No tripod. I was handholding the camera. That's why I can't make a 5-photo panoramic: the center shot didn't align properly because I aimed a bit too low. I went back this morning to try it with a tripod but the sky was hazy with smoke so I came back home.
I'll watch for your email. Very much looking forward to seeing it. (Wave) ... Gary

Greg ... Howdy. And Thanx. Having reduced this one to post it, I'm wondering exactly how many clicks I could merge and still have a final pic that could be loaded into FA's gallery. I'm not exactly sure of FA's max size / pixel limits, but I truly doubt FA allows much more than I'm already using in my routine pic posts. And if I WAS able to merge three or four, I'd then have to reduce the final size so much that the pic would be unviewable. A while ago, I did merge two scanned old B & W photos into one (the AA B727 pic in my folder), but the final file size of that one wasn't very large; the pics I take with this Canon T6 are extremely large so merging three, four, or more would result in a superb quality pic ... but "monster huge"!! lol I'll have to experiment with the idea. Thanks again for your compli. :)

Incredible shot, Gary! Very nicely done! I'm guessing you cropped it just a little ;-)

Awesome shot!!!

Hand held in that light? Well done! What were the settings on the camera Gary?

Dwight >> Hi and Thanks for the compli. I used my 70-300 but it was almost fully retracted (around 75mm). The corners of each shot were a tad soft but since those were either all sky or all open ground the corners were of no importance so after the overlap was complete I straightened the merged result horizontally and then I did indeed crop the entire result down to mountaintop level at the top and up to (almost) runway level from the bottom. Not only did it eliminate the soft corners but cropping it also gave it the look of having been an extended-zoom shot.
Hi, Roy. (Wave) TY for the comment / compli. :-)
Mark >> 1/125 shutter, f5.0, ISO 800, 70-300VC mounted but almost completely retracted so f/length was between 70-75mm because the available ambient light was still quite low. I snapped the series twice: the second time I used the same settings except I went 1/160 on the shutter (no discernible diff in clarity but darker so I used the 1/125 series of snaps for this). The sky went thru a rather dramatic color shift from the start of the set to the end (from the first pic to the next and etc.), but because it was only dawn light the shift is quite natural-looking. I don't know a whole lot about editing (and I know absolutely nothing about using "layers") so my editing tools were SPOT HEAL, CLONE STAMP, and BLUR; then STRAIGHTEN, BRIGHTEN, and CROP. Then, in order to get the dang thing small enough to be able to upload it here in a way that would allow viewers to see the entire pic just by clicking on FULL, I reduced the size. By doing that, I knew I'd also cause a reduction in the overall Quality but at least viewers can see the whole shot instead of having to scroll it from left to right. (* As it turned out, it still has to be scrolled a bit, but hey, I tried ... lol)

Great shot Gary! I would love to see the 5 picture one if you are able to get it... even if you don't post it, send it in an email :)

Gary, that's a nice shot... and I can see some very slight color transition in the sky from left side to right side as you mentioned. It's almost undetectable to the eye.

Gary, it looks great on my large monitor and I can imagine a shot like this in a custom frame on the wall in front of my desk! Very nicely done...

Cliff and Jim ... Your comments are very kind and much appreciated. TYVM. PS to Jim ... I have a small screen here in my office. I'm a "technology challenged" type so I'm still trying to find a way to display my pics from the computer in the office all the way down to the large TV screen in the L room. If I ever figure it out, I'll be able to view this in a much larger size, too. (Grin and a wave)
Mark S >> One of the difficulties I'm having is caused by that SWA in the shot. It was taxiing; thus, it was moving. In my effort to click, turn, click, turn more, click, etc. (to snap the sequence of pics), I was intent on getting that SW clearly and I also had to turn and snap quickly or else the Southwest would have "invaded" the next pic. In my haste, I allowed the camera to move a bit higher and then to drop lower between pics. Now I can't get them to "marry up" (align) properly with each other. But this was basically an experiment so now that I've learned what I did wrong I can correct my errors next time. And one more thing to mention ... it takes rather a lot of effort and time to put them together. :-)

Beautiful shot...predawn, before all the APU's start screaming. Thanks for posting Gary and thanks for the sharing of photo and camera settings. Very cool! 5X5*