Rainbows and supernumeraries

During last weekend (Sunday 4th May -08) at city of Espoo, I observed seasons first rainbow. Local thunderstorm came along with rainshowers produring primary and secondary bows. I visually saw 3 primary supernumeraries.

In the heavily enhanced image (USM) of primary bow there is small hint of 4th supernumerary visible (1). Outside of seconday bow (2) there is larger arc (dark pink color), assuming it indicates supernumerary also... The droplet sizes may been quite even, due to easily visible interference bows.

Heiligenschein and dewbow in moon light

Well, I wanted to observe moon halos that evening, but the sky was totally clear without any cirrus clouds.
I noticed that some blades of the plants on a field were rather wet. I walked some steps into the field and immediately noticed a clear brightening around the shadow of my head. I did a few steps to the left and to the right and could see a very faint dew bow. So I took some photographs at different exposure times and ISOs. The best photographs (1 2) I achieved using stop 4, an 18-mm-lens and at a time of exposure of 45 seconds at ISO 400.

Author: Michael Großmann, Kämpfelbach, Germany

Polarization Colours in Airplane Window

Patrice Touhar took this photograph through the window of an airplane using a polarization filter and so made these polarization colours appear.

The colours are generated by the combination of three circumstances:

1. There is polarized light behind the window
2. The window is made of a double refracting matter
3. A polarization filter is used in front of the window

Under these circumstances, the light gets split up into two coherences of polarized components which travel through the window at different speeds. This causes a phase difference the amount of which depends from the wavelength. This means that the polarization gets transformed once into a linear polarization of a different direction than the origin for a certain colour, and into a circular polarization for another colour (Lissagiu interference of two waves). As the polarization is now dependent from the colour, the colours appear when a polarization filter is used, no matter if this filter is placed in front of the eye or in front of a camera.

These colours can be seen and photographed under the following circumstances:

1. There is polarized on one side of the window coming from the blue sky (Rayleigh scattering) and reflection from water and the scattering caused by clouds
2. The window is made of plastic. In this material there are mechanical tensions which cause a double refraction.
3. There is a polarization filter in front of the camera.

The last condition is not necessary if you look at the window from an acute angle. Then the light becomes already polarized by the refraction. In this case there is no filter necessary to see the colours. However, the colours you can see under this circumstance are fainter than the colours seen through the polarization filter because refraction polarizes only a part of the light.

You can also find another observation of this kind in this former thread.

Spectral Colours on Metal Surface

During my work I noticed that a grinded metal surface divides the sunlight into its spectral colours (1 2 3). But this happans only when there are small scratches with a maximum depth of 0,003 to 0,005 millimeters. The scratches shown here are about 30 – 40 mm long, but unfortunately I cannot tell you what shape they are. The worked article was positioned horizontally on a workbench and the sun elevation was at about 50-55° (28.06.2007 at 11.30 hours CEST in Pforzheim). The visual angle onto the worked part was about 80°. The question I think about is: How can the white light be split up into its spectral colours that way, and, much more important: What shape of the hollow is necessary to reflect the spectral light this way?

Author: Michael Großmann, Kämpfelbach, Germany

Multiple rainbows

Jan. 12, 2008
Riding home on the bus this afternoon, I noticed the rainbow off to the East. The sun was low in the west and was not far from setting, so the clouds were beginning to take on a golden hue. The rainbow looked like it was repeated numerous times and fading off in the distance. I got off at the next stop and pulled out my new pocket-sized digicam and snapped a couple of pics. I checked out Les Cowley's Atmopsheric optics page and it seems that the closest thing I could find were supernumerary bows, but these seemed to be more spaced out than the examples on his website. So is that what these are? I have included two pictures (1 2) and two contrast enhanced b&w versions of the pictures to better show the details (1 2).
Picture details: Canon SD1000, ISO 200, 1/160 sec, f4.9

Author: Darryl Luscombe, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Aircraft Iridescence

While taking wildlife pictures in a nature reserve close to the Vienna, Austria, airport, Franz Kerschbaum noticed this 747 jet aircraft in a landing approach with a huge condensation cloud behind its wings. As it moved closer to the runway, he was evidently at just the right position for this shocking but beautiful artificial iridescent cloud to come into view. Iridescence and coronas are diffraction phenomena. The pastel or metallic colors result from deflection of sunlight about minute water droplets.

Photo details: Canon EOS 30D camera, 100-400 mm/4.5-5.6L lens at 400 mm and f/8.0

Unusually bright twilights over Western Europe

Between February 17 and February 20, 2008, large parts of Western Europe witnessed a series of unusually bright morning and evening twilights.
A few minutes after a quite normal sunset, the western skies began to burn in a strange yellow light which was bright enought to illuminate the landscape and giving a quite unreal touch to houses and trees.
Some minutes later, the yellow light in the west became surrounded by a brownish rim, turning into purple within some minutes. The yellow part of the sky slowly shrank towards the horizon, turning into orange and later into red and crimson. Some observers also reported of a dark, brownish-red light in the east which surrounded the whole horizon reaching up to 10° high.
The strange lights and colours in the sky were visible for up to about one hour after sunset. A similar “light-show” also appeared in the morning, starting with a crimson light over the eastern horizon and ending with the bright yellow light short before sunrise. The yellow illumination of the landscape could even be perceived through layers of low clouds (stratus) in some areas.
The phenomenon was reported from the British Isles, Scandinavia, The Netherlands and Germany, and there are even reports of unusual twilight observations from northern Spain.

These in some cases weird-looking twilights were probably caused by an outbreak of polar stratospheric clouds (PSC). These form at temperatures below -78°C in the stratosphere, at an altitude of about 20 – 25 km above the ground.
Soundings made at several stations showed that temperatures in the stratosphere really were unusually low over western Europe; up to -87°C (De Bilt) were measured, the lowest since measurements began in the 1980s. This makes the formation of PSC over a large area possible. Some photographs also show faint structures in the light, giving hints that they actually were caused by PSC.

Polar stratospheric clouds have never before been observed so far south. Normally, they can only be seen from Scandinavia, Canada and Alaska. Only in 1999 there was a confirmed observation of PSC from northern Germany.

Authors: Peter Krämer, Bochum & Claudia Hinz, Brannenburg

Unusual corona around the moon

In the evening of February 14, 2008, an orographic cloud similar to this one formed above a sea of clouds under the influence of foehn wind above Mt.Wendelstein (1838m) in the Bavarian Alps. In this orographic cloud, an corona appeared around the moon which was more intensive and larger than any corona I had seen before. 4 systems of rings were clearly visible. The intensitiy leads me to the conclusion that all water droplets in the cloud were of the same size.

As I had a position very close to the cloud, the corona was extraordinarily large. A comparision to the constellation of Orion shows that it had a diameter of more than 20°. Below its lower part, the corona turned into a faint pink and green iridescence, indicating that the droplets were smaller towards the rim of the cloud. And it was also interesting that the thin cloud as well as the corona did not show greater changes in intensity and shape for about 4 hours. They only dissolved when the foehn wind broke down and the clouds of a masked upper level cold front came up.

Shadows casting shadows

In the late afternoon of February 10, 2008, my friend and I went to a little pond on a field in Bochum, Germany, to take a few landscape photographs. It was a sunny day with a cloudless sky and no wind, so that the sun could be reflected very well from the smooth surface of the pond.
When we went along the pond, our shadows fell upon the water. As the sun was very low – it was about one hour before sunset – our shadows extended over the whole width of the pond, with the heads just beneath a bush positioned on the other side of the pond. Suddenly I noticed two fainter shadows just above the heads of our shadows, moving over the bush. When we stopped, these additional shadows appeared only as two faint stripes extending upwards across the bush from the heads of our shadows, as it can be seen in the wide-angle picture.

But when we moved, the phenomenon became quite obvious. So I did not only take a few photographs, but also made a short video with my digital camera. The video can be watched here.

What caused these additional shadows? First I thought that they were just the reflections of our shadows on the water, but when I later thought about my observation, I realized that it was a little bit more complicated:
The sun was shining on the water, and the sunlight was reflected from the smooth water surface. From the other side of the pond there could be seen a reflected picture of the sun in the water. This picture – or, better said – the reflected sunlight fell upon the bush, together of course with the direct sunlight. So the bush received direct light from the sun and also reflected light from the water surface.
When our shadows fell upon the water, the shadowed parts of the water could not reflect any more sunlight, so that the areas above the shadows received only the direct sunlight. So the parts of the bush which did not get the additional reflected light appeared less bright than the rest of it forming two slightly darker stripes extending upward from our shadows. So, what we saw were two secondary shadows, the shadows of our shadows. For a visual explanation of the phenomenon, I also drew a skech of the situation.

Never before I had thought that a shadow could also cast a shadow, and this observation was only possible because it was absolutely calm that afternoon. The slightest wind would have caused ripples on the water and thus blurred those secondary shadows.

Author: Peter Krämer, Bochum, Germany

Frost Optics

2008/02/10 Taken in Green Bay, Wisconsin, USA at temperature of -10 F. I looked out to see the sunrise refracting through frost crystals on our back window. The entire pane sparkled with these delicate, miniature creations, but only a few of them were postitioned so that I could see the entire color spectrum at once.