When I said that wake watching made me happy last week, did you really think those were all the wakes I was going to show you? Ha! No, I have plenty more! :-) Today, I want to show you a couple that have one thing in common: the way that they show up against the […]
Remember the hands-on demo of the phase of the moon? Holding a sphere up in the sunlight in the direction of the moon, the sphere will show the same phase as does the moon. Of course it has to, because the sun is so far away that its rays hitting the moon and the ones hitting the sphere […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
In 2012, I happened to be at an ESWN workshop in Madison, WI, when, during one of the breaks, one of the participants mentioned that it might be possible to get into the historic Washburn Observatory to watch Venus’ transit. Of course I had to go! We stood in a very long queue under overcast skies […]
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 […]
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 […]
A rainbow that isn’t one, technically speaking. Browsing through the photos on my phone, I came across the one below that I took two years ago in Bergen. I remember taking the picture with Nadine on our way home, and wanting to look up what phenomenon caused this ring around the sun, but I never did […]
