Negative rays
Sun 30th November 2008, 6.27 pm
I was at Levenshulme station last night after a party and I caught this photo of something I've never seen before.
It was very foggy and a bright light at street-level was illuminating the fog in a bright ball. If I stood in just the right position, so that the light was directly behind a large tree, I could see the tree cast shadows onto the bright ball in perfectly straight lines, like some sort of negative rays. The feeling was that the shadows were being projected right across the station to the platform on my side - it was exactly the experience one gets when looking at normal rays.
Does this phenomenon have a name? It's pretty obvious why it happens, but I'd never seen anything like it before, and probably never will again.
Tagged as:
rays
shadows
fog
levenshulme
illusion
I'm feeling relaxed
I'm singing The Killers - A Dustland Fairytale
davep
on Mon 1st December 2008, 9.23 am
If, when you say "normal rays", you mean crepuscular rays, then that's pretty much what you're looking at: shadows. You just happen to have a light source that isn't the Sun and it's not clouds that are casting the shadows.
You find information on all sorts of atmospheric shadows at http://www.atoptics.co.uk/rayshad.htm
