This 747 passing overhead shows clearly how the contrails of four engines mix to show only two contrails when seen from a distance. The wake turbulence from the wings swirls the exhaust around in both sides, so engine 1+2 and 3+4 contrails become 2 instead of 4 contrails. In the middle there is a fifth trail - this is water from the drain mast - the outlet from kitchen and lavatory SINKS. No, it is neither chemical spraying nor toilet waste, just water.
Editing: I am not so good with PS yet (will I ever be?), mainly I use Google Picasa. Here I have used curves, as I tried to bring out detail in the contrail, but at the same time not make the entire picture too dark. Also some saturation and lightness, using master channel first to make it darker, then the blue channel to bring the sky back again to normal. At last, Noise Ninja to clear the picture up a little. And, of course it is both cropped and resized ...
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This entry did a lot worse than I thought. Some thought it was taken with a powerful zoom from the ground (?), but it is taken inflight, as traffic is passing above. When two jet aircraft are passing head on (at different levels, preferrably!), it takes about 3 seconds for each mile you are losing in. Add to that the difficulty of focussing through the thick and multilayered windscreen, and it is somewhat a challenge to get it sharp. The sky is very clean blue aloft, so although I tried to adjust color and contrast, it is not far from what it looks like for real. I used to fly Learjets, and have been up to 48000 feet on one occasion. Besides being very clear from here that the Earth is round, the blue in the sky gets darker and darker, as one is almost at the edge of space here (not much more than 10-15% left here of the mass of the Atmosphere).
I guess that the plane was very high and you used an very long lens. But even then it would have been small in the frame so the crop here may not have been reduced in size which would explain the lack of quality. In which case you get marks for attempting something difficult and in the process showing the vapour trails in an original way.
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