posted 05-09-2002 09:13 PM            

Nah, just an atmospheric phenomenon known as a Brocken Spectre

For some more neat pictures of atmospheric phenomenon

posted 05-11-2002 11:02 PM            

Yes, Glories and Brocken Specters are basically the same phenomina. Brocken specters are named for a mountain in Germany where they were first reported, supposedly they scared a mountain climber so hard tha he fell to his death. This was sometime in the mid 1800's. Therefore, Brocken Specters is the tem applied when the phenomina is observed by mountain climbers and hikers. this aspect of the phenomina is fairly rare. Glories are are what you see when you are flying in an airplane and look down at the planes shadow in the clouds. This is fairly common, I have seen this myself a few times.

Notice in the photographs that the specter forms around the photographers shadow. One of the unique aspects to this phenomina, is that unless the climbers are standing side by side, each climber will only be able to see his own specter.

posted 05-11-2002 11:36 PM            

Alaska Science Forum

January 26, 1979

The Brocken Spectre
Article #282
by T. Neil Davis

This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. T. Neil Davis is a seismologist at the institute.

Most air travelers have observed glories in the vicinity of their aircraft's shadow on the clouds below. The glory is a part of a phenomenon familiar to mountaineers who know it as the Brocken Spectre.

According to legend, the name came from the unhappy circumstance of a climber on northern Germany's highest mountain, the Brocken. Working his way across a narrow precipice, the climber was startled by the sudden appearance in the nearby mists of a human figure with a ring of light around its head. Frightened, the climber fell to his death. If this event really took place, it was the climber's own shadow that he saw, and the ring of light was his own "glory" ring.

Two requirements must be met if one is to see her or his own glory. One must look exactly in the anti-solar direction and there must be many water droplets in the region where the glory is to appear. Since the shadow of one's own head appears only in the anti-solar direction, it makes sense that the glory ring will always be in the vicinity of the head's shadow.

Glories are common in high-latitude regions where the low sun angle allows a person to easily come between the sun and a fog or cloud bank. But glories are most easily seen when one is riding on the shadow side of an aircraft above the clouds. The clouds below provide the necessary water droplets.

The glory ring is caused by the phenomenon called diffraction. Sunlight penetrates individual water droplets, be they in rain, fog or clouds, and reflects off the back sides of the droplets.

Some of the light emerges from the droplet to come back essentially toward the sun. But the sunlight coming back toward the sun from the different raindrops interferes with itself to create circular zones of darkness and brightness. The diameter of the zone for each color of light is different.