American Airlines plane landing at St Martin Juliana Airport SXM by Peter Knoppers

Sony A200

SXM is a great spot to take photographs of approaching airplanes. I took about 15 photo's of this American Airlines plane as it came in to land at SXM on February 8, 2011 using varying focal distance settings. At the time I didn't think about stitching them together into a panorama. That came later and it wasn't easy; even though the Hugin stitching software did a great job in matching photos of different enlargements together. The stitching software invariably cut off wings (or fully removed the airplane in some photos). I "fixed" this by converting the files to PNG and using GIMP to create transparant area's in most of the photos in such a way that the stitcher had no choice but to include the airplane. I also used GIMP to fill in some gaps, remove one halved Sun bather from the beach, made the sea level a bit more level and give the result a nice, round border.
If you look carefully, you'll see 10 copies of the same airplane.
If you can figure out the type of airplane, or the flight number; please email me at gigapan@buttonius.com  and I'll fix this meta data.