Aaron Koblin's visualizations of commercial air traffic

I was recently stunned by Aaron Koblin's visualizations of commercial air traffic:

The following flight pattern visualizations are the result of experiments leading to the project Celestial Mechanics by Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne. FAA data was parsed and plotted using the Processing programming environment. The frames were composited with Adobe After Effects and/or Maya.

Why do I blog this? leaving aside the ecological problem of airtraffic, what is fantastic here is to see the overlap of flights, there is never a situation in which you have all those lines; geospatial traces up the air shows the history of flights, a kind of new layer in the atmosphere where people temporarily navigate. The movie is awesome.