Mary Shafer wrote:

OK, a guy at LaRC figured out a way to take Schlieren photos of the
shock field using a modified camera, an airplane, and the sun. He
took a photo of a T-38 at Wallops that ended up in AvLeak.


Go to www.dfrc.nasa.gov and select the technical reports. Search for
Ed Haering. One of his papers is about the two F-18s experiment and
another is about mapping the SR-71 shock field. One or the other
should have the Schlieren. If not, try the press releases. This is
probably from about 1996.


Thank you Mary, your pointers are exactly what I was hoping for.
Searching the Dryden reports server gave me several hits for Ed Haering,
but most of them were to do with sonic boom recording. I did find the
following relevant links, though: -

NASA Factsheet: Schlieren Photography - Ground to Air
http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Newsroom/Fa...-033-DFRC.html

Schlieren Photo Gallery Contact Sheet
http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Gallery/Pho...TML/index.html

Schlieren EC94-42528-1: Schlieren photograph of T-38 shock waves at Mach
1.1, 13,000 feet
http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Gallery/Pho...94-42528-1.jpg

Your confirmation that Schlieren photography was the technique in use
was valuable in itself: I couldn't be sure that NASA hadn't found some
other exotic way of photographing shock waves!

A little more searching lets me find this report on the Langley
server: "Visualization and Image Processing of Aircraft Shock Wave
Structures"

http://techreports.larc.nasa.gov/ltr...sfvip-lmw.html

It contains Schlieren photos of T-38, F-18 and SR-71 shock waves: but,
the SR-71 shock wave photo's do not include the image of the aircraft!