This sort of thing has always fascinated me; a plane moving at supersonic speed leaves a shock wave in its wake. The sonic boom is one thing, and is pretty awesome to experience, but the visible shock wave is something else entirely! This video of the launch of an Atlas V rocket shows a visible shock wave that radiates out horizontally as the rocket ascends; it looks like waves in a pool after a rock was thrown in the middle. I’ve never seen anything like that before.
And this video has the same event but from a different camera & vantage point (it’s toward the end of the video, at about 2:20.) Lots of other good video footage in it that I’ve seen before, but still amazing.
When I was in the SD Air National Guard we had somewhat regular training exercises where we would do our jobs as if we were really at war. To add some realism, pilots & aircraft from other bases would often be recruited to play the aggressors. On the Saturday morning of one very memorable training exercise, an aggressor snuck in under the radar and screamed past the base at supersonic speed (or very near it.) I happened to be walking across the flight line as he flew over, and remember it distinctly; looked up & saw this F4 Phantom fly past silently but incredibly fast. A half-second later the shock wave hit, and it almost knocked me over it was so LOUD… Wow. Because I was on the flight line and he was dropping imaginary bombs and strafing the aircraft on the line with imaginary 20mm rounds as he flew past, I instantly became an imaginary casualty and spent the rest of the guard drill laying on a cot in the morgue. Cheery.