Wednesday, 2 November 2011

Crepuscular sun rays are parallel! Bad Astronomy

When you are outdoors at sunset, many occasions you ll be welcomed with spectacular sun rays of sunshine and shadow stretching over the sky. They are known as crepuscular sun rays, and therefore are triggered by clouds obstructing the daylight, their lengthy shadows cast on haze along with other particles floating within our air.

Individuals sun rays fan out, distributing away at different angles but that s an illusion! The sun rays are parallel, and that i offer this photograph as proof:

[Click to penumbrenate.]

That shot was adopted October 18, 2011, by an astronaut aboard the Worldwide Space Station because it passed over India. Towering cumulonimbus clouds put their lengthy shadows back, from the Sun. Observe that the shadows from different clouds are parallel to one another! That s since the Sun is extremely far in comparison towards the distance between your clouds.

Here s an image I discovered on Flickr showing what we should see in the ground, though (this is not of the identical clouds, but simply an average display of crepuscular sun rays). The fanning from the sun rays is really an illusion, triggered by perspective! This is the same factor which makes railroad tracks or lengthy streets seem to converge within the distance. Things farther away look more compact, therefore the parallel rails of the railroad track seem to approach together while you look farther away. For railroad tracks you appear lower to determine this for cloud shadows you appear up! Apart from that, they re exactly the same.

How come the shadows within the first picture look parallel This is since the astronaut was searching straight lower around the clouds and shadows, so his distance to the area of the shadow was roughly exactly the same the cisco kid close to the cloud and way downstream (as they say) were both comparable distance from him. That negates the perspective effect, and also the shadows are revealed for which they really are: parallel.

Astronauts have stated it for a long time, however it bears repeating: exploring space provides you with perspective. As well as in this situation, this is literally true.

Image credit: NASA Elsie, Esq. s Flickr Stream


Related posts:

- Crepuscular sun rays
- My comic premier
- A sun pillar gooses heaven
- Thus spoked the Dumbbell

November second, 2011 7:00 AM Tags: crepuscular sun rays, parallel, perspective, photo voltaic eclipse
by Phil Plait in Pretty pictures, Science 3 comments Feed Trackback >



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