light – Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching

Wave watching by proxy — looking at how waves focus light on the sea floor

mglessmer — Fri, 01 Mar 2019 13:35:45 +0000

What is it that we actually look at when we go wave watching? Water is pretty much clear (or at least it is in the spots where I like to go wave watching), so how come we are able to see waves? What we are looking at are not actually the waves themselves, but at […]

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Optics

mglessmer — Thu, 02 Mar 2017 11:45:16 +0000

I’ve even talked about it on this blog before, but I find it still fascinating how every tiny droplet manages to flip the world upside down :-)

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Refraction of light in moving water — why stuff seems to be jumping around

mglessmer — Thu, 29 Dec 2016 09:52:34 +0000

I was waking along Kiel fjord one morning and noticed a stone “jump” on the ground as waves went over it (and actually, that observation was the motivation to dive into stuff from the last post, too). I think the stone only looked so curious because the rest of the ground was uniformly sandy and hence […]

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Refraction of light in water — looking at a couple of examples

mglessmer — Tue, 27 Dec 2016 09:32:33 +0000

Looking at how light gets refracted when it enters water is always fascinating. There are a dozen blog posts on the topic on this blog alone, but let me talk about it again today. In a 1908 article, Charles Judd (as summarised in Barnett & Ceci, 2002) describes an experiment where kids throw darts at […]

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As frost starts melting, and the roof is getting dry, oh! The sun is up.

mglessmer — Mon, 19 Oct 2015 09:09:37 +0000

My office looks out directly onto the roof of our main lecture theatre, and it is fascinating how much you can observe just by looking out of a window and onto a roof. Below is a picture of one of the first cold mornings we had this year. As the sun rose, more and more of […]

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Diffraction of light

mglessmer — Fri, 07 Nov 2014 06:47:31 +0000

Today I’m playing with the sun. As I mentioned in the sun dog post already, I recently went on the ferry from Kiel to Gothenburg. And I had plenty of time to watch the sun rise and set. One thing that kept me entertained for quite a while is to squeeze the sun through the imaginary […]

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Lighthouses and Fresnel lenses

mglessmer — Fri, 10 Oct 2014 04:35:27 +0000

Or more reasons for why I want to live in a lighthouse. I have always been fascinated by lighthouses. Always. Usually because they are built in the most wonderful places and I would just love to live there. For example one near San Francisco that has this view: But then also because they can cast […]

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The broken spoon

mglessmer — Wed, 06 Nov 2013 03:22:13 +0000

Refraction of light in water. I just happened to notice this the other day, so I thought I’d take a picture and share it with you. It is amazing how much more aware of everyday things that can be used to illustrate concepts related to oceanography I have become since starting this blog! This is so […]

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