optics – 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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Rainbows in regnbyen Bergen

mglessmer — Mon, 01 Oct 2018 17:33:42 +0000

Yesterday when approaching Bergen airport, I saw something super cool: The lower half of a rainbow! Even though I grabbed my phone and snapped a picture in record time, I didn’t manage to capture it. Bummer! But that doesn’t keep me from writing about it while showing you a “normal” rainbow I took a picture […]

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Observing waves differently

mglessmer — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 11:22:41 +0000

When we speak about “observing waves”, we usually mean looking at the water’s surface as an opaque surface that reflects the sky and where we see waves mainly due to being lit differently on different sides. But there are other ways to observe waves! For example by how they focus light on the ground below. […]

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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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Reflections on reflections

mglessmer — Tue, 15 Nov 2016 09:31:26 +0000

When we think about reflections in water, we usually think of calm lakes and trees on the shore opposite to us. Or clouds. Or at least that’s what I think of: Everything is so far away, that it seems to be reflected at an axis that is a horizontal line far away from us. Then the […]

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The difference between secondary rainbows and double rainbows

mglessmer — Wed, 14 Oct 2015 09:39:18 +0000

More reflection or more rain? Ha, aren’t you enjoying talking about optics again? Sometimes you see two rainbows that both have red on the outside and blue on the inside. And according to my post on secondary rainbows, that should not be the case. Yet is has been observed. Why? As you remember, secondary rainbows […]

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Sun dogs

mglessmer — Mon, 12 Oct 2015 09:49:55 +0000

Recently spotted: sun dogs, a special form of halo! Or rather sun dog (singular), since there was only one to be seen and not a second one at equal distance from the sun but on its opposite side. These pictures are exactly as my camera took them without any filters or color enhancement or anything. […]

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Rainbows and prisms

mglessmer — Fri, 10 Jul 2015 09:56:02 +0000

Lets go back and talk about one of my favorite non-oceanographic topics: Rainbows! When I had my rainbow phase about a year ago, my mom sent me the movie below, which shows what you see when you look directly into the prism that paints these kinds of rainbows all over my parents’ living room: When you look directly into […]

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