I found the Swan Lake of the Skies on APOD, which redirected me with a link to this YouTube video.

This is no minor bit of computing. Just making it run properly would have been quite an achievement, but the result is definitely worth it. The sheer number of elements, working together, makes for a really beautiful sight.

Over the course of a day, the entire east coast lights up, with a solid mass of light showing the formation of that side of the country. A night shot shows another dramatic, colored tracery.

The continental-sized inflight movie is comprised of flights over a couple of days in March 2005.

Looking at it from space, it would look like a hyperactive cat’s cradle, waxing and waning.

The West Coast, featuring, naturally enough Los Angeles and Hawaii, is another solid mass of light at various times, with a sort of ghostly air to it, as the planes head out over the Pacific.

It’s a bit like looking at fine silver filigree, the lines seem to become a series of designs as you watch.

Scientifically the idea is something population studies could previously have only dreamed of doing. The tracing of individual paths like that could work for a lot of different types of science. Imagine tracing ants or bees like that, or an entire ecology. This definitely does have applications for microbiology, entomology, and even botany.

(I mention ants and bees because the poor entomologists have literally been tracing individual insects for decades. Microbiologists, who start off nuts anyway, have it even worse.)

This could be one of the great screensavers of all time.