Wakes and what they do to the sun’s reflection
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…
Tag: sun
Why does the sun have to be a lot further from us than the moon? A deduction.
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 frost starts melting, and the roof is getting dry, oh! The sun is up.
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…
The difference between secondary rainbows and double rainbows
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.…
Sun dogs
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…
Transit of Venus and upcoming solar eclipse on March 20th!
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…
Diffraction of light
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…
Sun dogs
More refraction of light. Recently I found myself on the ferry from Kiel to Gothenburg, watching the sun rise. Next to the sun, I noticed a piece of a rainbow.…
What are the ingredients of a rainbow?
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…
Sun halo
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…