Tag Archives: reflection

Waves on Aasee in Münster. By Mirjam S. Glessmer

Wave hunt expedition. You don’t need to live close to the coast to observe all kinds of wave phenomena!

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A 1.5 hour walk around a lake — and 242 photos of said lake — later I can tell you one thing: You definitely don’t need to live close to the coast in order to observe wave phenomena!

The idea to go on a “wave hunt expedition” is actually not mine (although it definitely sounds like something I could have come up with!), it’s Robinson’s idea. Robinson had students go on wave hunt expeditions as part of their examination, and present their results in a poster. I was so impressed with that, that I had to do it myself. Obviously. So the second best thing about work travel (right after the best thing, again, obviously!) is that I find myself in a strange place with time on my hand to wander around and explore. Not that Münster might not have been a nice city to explore, but the lake…

Anyway. I only want to show you 53 out of the 242 pictures. I was going to annotate all of them so you actually see what I mean. And I started annotating. But since I am giving a workshop tomorrow (which is all prepared and ready, but I do need my beauty sleep!) I only drew the key features in the pictures, and you will have to come up with the correct keywords all by yourself (have your pick: refraction! diffraction! fetch! interference! :-)) So click through the gallery below and see first the original photo and then one that I drew in. Do you spot the same stuff that I saw, or what else do you see? Let me know!

Waves on Aasee in Münster. By Mirjam S. Glessmer

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If you think it would be useful to see all those pictures with proper annotations and descriptions at some point please let me know. I might still be excited enough to actually do it, who knows…

P.S.: I actually really enjoy work travel for the work parts, too. For example, I went to a great workshop in Dortmund earlier this year to learn about a quality framework for quantitative research, and that workshop was amazing. And a week ago, I went to Stuttgart for a meeting with all the fellows of the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft, which was also great. And now I am giving this workshop in Münster, that I am actually really excited about because I managed to condense pretty much all I know about “active learning in large groups” into a 2.5 hour workshop. Just so you don’t get the wrong idea about my priorities. Obviously water comes first, but then work is a very close second ;-)

The difference between secondary rainbows and double rainbows

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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?

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Rainbow and secondary rainbow, seen at Heathrow Airport. Picture by my friend F.

As you remember, secondary rainbows form outside the primary rainbows because the light is reflected twice inside the raindrop rather than only once as in the case of a primary rainbow. But that second rainbow with red on the outer rim and blue on the inner is formed differently.

Until now we’ve assumed that all the rainbows appear on the same rain front. This is not the case for the rainbow we are talking about here – it is formed on a second rain front behind the first one. So the path of light within rain drops of both rainbows on both fronts is similar, with light being only reflected once for each rainbow.

When you google double rainbows, you sometimes find pictures of two rainbows, both with red on the outer rim, nicely separated from each other. And when you see those pictures, you can be pretty sure that they’ve been photoshopped. Double rainbows of the kind we are talking about here overlap, and usually you see one full rainbow with all its colors, and then a slightly smaller rainbow with only green, blue and purple peeking out:

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If you look closely, there is a green-and-purple band on the inside of the complete rainbow. Double rainbow!

Sun dogs

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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.

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Sun dog spotted somewhere between Mölln and Hamburg

These pictures are exactly as my camera took them without any filters or color enhancement or anything. Isn’t it weird that we appeared to be the only car stopping every couple of minutes to watch while everybody just continued driving?

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Sun dog spotted somewhere between Mölln and Hamburg

Waves radiating from an object

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In the last post, I showed you flow separation on a pylon in Elbe river. Remember?

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Flow separation at a pylon in Elbe river

Today, we are back at the same pylon, only that this time the tidal current is a lot less strong, but there is a lot of wind, so our focus is on wind-generated waves.

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Waves running towards the pylon and radiating radially away from the obstacle.

It might be admittedly a bit hard to see, but if you watch closely and use your imagination, you might be able to see the waves propagating towards the pylon and then being reflected and radiating radially outward from where they hit the pylon. Pretty fascinating!

Can you see the locally generated waves to the left of the pylon? All those tiny waves where the wind is funneled around the pylon?

 

What are the ingredients of a rainbow?

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Still collecting materials for our instructional short movies.

A while back I talked about how my colleague and I were experimenting with short instructional screen casts, and I shared some first attempts at movies on how rainbows form. We are still working on a story board for an improved version, but I was lucky enough to see a very pretty rainbow in a fountain the other day.

The picture below is a good demonstration of how rainbows form where there are water droplets in the air (provided there is enough sunlight, too, and we are watching from the right position) – we still see a bit of the rainbow to the right of the fountain, even though the wind direction has changed and the fountain is now blown to the left, visible because of the mist and the lower part of rainbow.

Fascinated as I was I had to film clips of this, too, which are combined in the movie below. There you see the rainbow appearing and disappearing, depending on where the fountain is moved by the wind, i.e. whether it is moved to the part of the sky where all the angles are right for us to see a rainbow, or not.

It was a magical moment – enjoy! :-)

Why do we only see rainbows in the mornings and evenings, but never at noon?

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Another movie on rainbows

My dearest readers, I hope you are still as fascinated by rainbows as I am? Today I’m giving you another movie explaining something rainbow-related, namely why we do not see rainbows when the sun is too high up in the sky. The video is stylistically similar to the ones I did before, and while practice really helps and I am getting pretty fast in making this kind of videos now, I am ready to try something new. But using doceri is something that I could imagine doing operationally if I was to use this kind of movies in my courses. It is really a nice tool!

So here is my movie. As always, let me know how you like it and what I could do better!

P.S.: Whenever I say or write 82, what I mean is 84! But according to my colleague it is actually beneficial to learning if movies aren’t perfect, because hesitation or small mistakes create irritations in the learner, which then make him think about what you were saying. And as the learner is now engaging more actively, the learning process is more successful. So there you go! :-)

Rainbows III

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Updated movie following Arne’s advice.

When I asked for feedback on the rainbow movies the other day, Arne had a pretty good idea for how one of the explanations could be made more intuitive. I have other people’s comments still in the queue and I’m working on them, this is still very much in the trial & error phase… And unfortunately it’s in german, which I didn’t realize until I had uploaded it.

But please do keep the comments coming, I will include them eventually!

Secondary rainbows

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Sometimes you get lucky and see a double rainbow. But how does the second rainbow form?

On my first 17th of May in Bergen, Ellen invited me to her home for a traditional dinner, which was exceptional. And as a bonus we got to see a double rainbow over Store Lungårdsvann!

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Double rainbow in Bergen on May 17th 2011

The outer rainbow is the so-called secondary rainbow, and as you can see the colors in the secondary rainbow are reversed, with red being on the inside and blue being on the outside.

Having watched my explanations in the textbook-style movie or in the short movie collection, is the sketch below enough information for you to make sense of how a secondary rainbow forms?

If the sketch isn’t clear – what additional information would you need to make sense of the sketch?

Here comes the movie in case you’d like to watch it:

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I have yet a newer version of the rainbow movies as well as the one pictured above ready for you, but I thought I’d give you a bit of a break from rainbows and talk about something else for a while. But we’ll be back to rainbows soon, promise!

Rainbows and refraction II

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Taking the same graphics as in this post, but presenting them differently.

In the previous post, I presented a screen cast explaining, in a very text-booky way, how rainbows form. Today, I am using the same graphics, but I have broken the movie into six individual snippets.

I’m starting out from the schematic that concluded last post’s movie and ask  five questions that you could ask yourself to check whether you understand the schematic:

Ideally I want to link the other five of the movies into the one above, but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet, so here you go for the answers:

What do you think of this way of presenting the material? Do you like it better than the textbook-y movie? I’m curious to hear your opinions!

For both this and the other way of displaying the material, I am toying with the idea of adding quizzes throughout the movies, in a programmed learning kind of way. But considering all the pros and cons, I haven’t made a final decision on it yet. What do you think?

Rainbows and refraction

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Why is a rainbow always red on top and blue at the bottom?

We always talk about prisms and refraction and stuff, but be honest – would you be able to explain the order of colors in a rainbow without pausing and thinking first?

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Rainbow. Picture taken in Laufenselden in 1996

As I said the other day, I am currently experimenting with screen casts. This is my very first attempt – I didn’t write a script so it is pretty chaotic, I have a cold (which you can hear from my voice), my handwriting sucks, the movie is, at 4 minutes, about twice as long as I wanted it to be – it is not perfect and I will certainly modify it before using it in teaching. But I would be very interested in your feedback so I can improve it!

As you noticed, this is a very textbook-y screen cast. I’ll present an alternative model for the same topic in my next post.

P.S.: As you might have noticed from the watermarks in the video, I have continued experimenting with screen cast programs and am currently using Doceri. And I am very happy with it!