Taking Pictures of Commercial Planes at night

[phkc0704081]

I have an upcoming plane spotting trip and I'll be in a great area to take on my personal challenge of getting a sharp crystal clear picture of a plane in the sky at night. I'm looking for some advice to achieve this goal.

1. The environment will be on a hotel rooftop with a great view of the glidepath to LAX. I will be no farther than 2,500 feet from the planes, and they will be less than 4,200 feet from touchdown. Aircraft speed will probably never exceed 160mph, most will probably be slower than that. While the sky will be dark, there will be plenty of lights from the city. Also, the aircraft's exterior lights will be on, specifically the tail light that shows off the aircraft's logo.

2. My camera is a Canon R5 Mark ii, full frame. My fastest lens with any kind of zoom is the 70-200mm that has a constant f2.8 as the widest aperture. When focused at the full 200m, I calculate that it will give a coverage width of about 450 feet. The aircraft I'll be shooting will vary in length between 120 feet and 242 feet, so there could be some heavy cropping going on. My next Zoom Lens is the Canon 100-500mm rf which has a much smaller aperture, rated at f4.5 at 100mm, so we're probably looking at a f5.6 or f5.8 at 300mm.

3. Flash - my only flash is a Canon EL-1. While a good flash indeed, I've learned to believe that it won't do much good on a subject that's nearly 1/2 mile away. Bringing stronger flashes or strobes is not an option. Also, I tried using the flash at this location before, but it was extremely humid and we all know how that went.

4. Tripod - I'll have my travel tripod. If I remember correct, my good one won't work there. There's like a bar table around the perimeter of the skydeck and a protective railing that goes higher than my good tripod will extend. I'll have to use my travel tripod with only the neck extended, sitting it on the bar table.

So, onto my thought process for this. No matter what I do, I need to open the aperture up all the way. There's no getting around that. Shutter speed - I'll take a few test shots on scene and see what the slowest shutter speed I can use is. ISO: I'm just going to have to allow some noise in and hope that Adobe Camera Raw's denoise feature will do the trick. The only other option I see is to sacrafice a little light by going with a faster shutter speed and trying to brighten it in post. Thankfully I'll have two evenings on the skydeck and should be able to try both strategies, however I'm more confident in Adobe's ability to denoise rather than brighten a night photo.

Are there any other recommendations to make this challenge successful?