St. Joseph (lower left) and Kansas City Missouri from the air.
Constellations (Sagittarius and Scorpius), Meteor (left center), and Saturn (above the scorpion’s back).
Theoretically, you shouldn’t be able to take nice, clear night sky photos from an airplane flying at 600 MPH. But there were moments that it felt like the engines throttled back and we were just coasting. That was when I would click the shutter. Then the engines would kick in and the vibrations would return. I had the ISO cranked up to 12,800 and the shutter speed was 1.6 seconds. I held the camera as steady as I could. The meteor was just luck.
I have tried night photos like this on subsequent flights, but not with results quite this crystal clear.
This is the Stellarium app (a free download) which is showing a computer simulation of the night sky at the same date and time as my photo.