It starts out looking like some shadowy tornado was crawling towards the plane. What’s really going on? This is actually a solar eclipse filmed far above the clouds.

As you can hear some of the passengers got very excited.

This is Alaska Airlines flight #870 on route from Anchorage to Honolulu. The airline kindly made some small adjustments so passengers could see the eclipse from out of their windows. This wasn’t a spur of the moment decision as Joe Rao, a year ago, worked out that the flight would intersect the “path of totality”.

As a result the associate astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History and a dozen other “eclipse chasers” were on board the flight.

What changes did Alaska Airlines make? They flew the flight 20 minutes early; otherwise they would have missed the sight.