May 21, 2014. CWS.
Contrails are of interest to both the astronomical and the climate communities. Models predict optical depth of 0.1 to 0.5, persisting over tens of minutes to hours, even as contrail disperses and widens.
With 15 mm focal length lens we have a plate scale of about 160 arcsec/pixel, and at a range of 10 km this is a size of 160*5E-6*10E3=8 meters! So we have no problem resolving the cross-track contrail that is about 100m in width. It would span many pixels. Even with 10 mm focal length lens, it would be nicely resolved.
References on contrails: