9/3/2023 0 Comments Superior mirage"Since cold air is denser than warm air, it bends light towards the eyes of someone standing on the ground or on the coast, changing how a distant object appears," he said. He went on to explain that is can happen when the air is very cold. The photographer David Morris was stunned by what he captured, thinking the ship was floating.īut what was really going on? BBC meteorologist David Braine has explained that illusions like this can occur because of "special atmospheric conditions that bend light". The picture was taken in Falmouth, Cornwall and is an example of a "superior mirage". It proved lucrative Willoughby made meaningful money selling prints of the shot, and claimed before his death to have sold the original lantern slide for $500.A rare optical illusion has made it seem like a ship is floating in the air above the sea. Willoughby’s photo was almost undoubtedly a ruse to make a quick buck: his image was later identified as being a particularly moody photograph of Bristol, complete with identifiable landmarks, probably purchased by the prospector as a job lot with some camera gear. ( Read: In the polar night of Russia's far north, legends and lives are frozen in time.) His explanation was that it was some sort of atmospheric reflection of a steepled, faraway town, perhaps in Arctic Russia. This was given a bizarrely specific – not to mention enterprising – twist when Richard Willoughby, a gold prospector in Alaska, claimed to have photographed such a ‘silent city’ in the sky above a glacier near Juneau in 1888. The translation is ‘fairy fog.’ Spooks, scams and cities in the skyĪway from the water, a persistent report from 19 th century travellers detailed mysterious cityscapes appearing in the sky above certain Arctic regions. Less well known is its meteorological sister, the fata bromosa – another optical illusion that gives the appearance of a mist that seems to envelop (and eject) objects close to the horizon. The phenomenon was given an Italian term due to a tendency to occur in the Straits of Messina, off Sicily and is often a synonym for any kind of mirage, though there are different physics at play in each. Such sightings were considered bad omens, but both are attributable to mirages, or in the case of a ‘flying’ ship, looming.Īnother term often employed to describe an optical illusion on the horizon is fata morgana – named for Morgan le Fey, the legendary magical half-sister of King Arthur who was infamous for her visual trickery. The old legend of the Flying Dutchman, a vengeful ghost clipper, was often associated with any peculiar sightings of a ship at sea, and one elevated off the water or exhibiting an inverse reflection – thus apparently sailing upside down – would certainly qualify. Centuries ago, long before darkroom trickery or the anything-goes digital world of Photoshop, superior mirages were scaring the daylights out of already superstitious sailors. The seemingly fantastical science of mirages has on occasion intertwined with the actually fantastical. Which can of course have consequences beyond the simply visual. Given its tendency to resemble rippling water in hot conditions such as a desert, it's a cruel trick to play on any parched traveller – and in any case, all of this rests on what the light is telling your brain, and the logical comparisons that then draws. ( Pictures: This photographer's abstract images of the world look like optical illusions.) This group of atmospheric quirks have amazed, tricked, confused – and struck fear – into the minds of travellers for centuries. But so counter-intuitive are the physics – and so uncanny are the results – few could pithily explain what was happening in the image, and how. It wasn’t long before the correct phenomenon of optical physics was nailed down, or thereabouts: what Morris had photographed was probably a rare illusion similar to a mirage, called looming. According to Morris, the ship 'looked and behaved like normal', as he observed it, snapping a series of pictures before returning attention to his dog. Morris, who had been walking his dog on the coastline near Gillan, near Falmouth, spotted the tanker on February 26 – the same day a similar vision was observed off the coast of Aberdeen. Some had fun with the headline semantics (a ‘ floating ship’ – isn’t that normal? LOL.) Others suggested digital tampering, while a few speculated the very large and obvious ship was being used to test radical new technology. IN early March 2021 when the internet caught hold of David Morris’s photograph of a large tanker ‘flying’ above the Cornwall horizon, responses ran wild.
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