Why there is a mirage. The optical phenomenon of a mirage and its types

Many of us have encountered the mirage effect, for this it is enough to remember how the road in the distance becomes a wave on a hot day. But truly large mirages can only be seen in the desert. In general, a mirage is just an optical phenomenon that creates the effect of seeing certain objects.

There are three classes of mirages. The first class is inferior mirages. With this kind of mirage Bottom part desert, i.e. a small strip of sand optically turns into a kind of reservoir. This can be seen if it is one level above this band. Such mirages are the most common. The second type of mirages is the upper mirages. This is a rarer phenomenon, moreover, less picturesque. Overhead mirages appear at great distances and at high altitudes above the horizon. The third class of mirages defies any explanation, and for many years scientists have been racking their brains over solving this mystery. Fata - morgana is considered the most beautiful and fantastic of the mirages. As if by magic, the most beautiful castles can arise, which are constantly moving. Another mysterious phenomenon is chronomirages, which depict events taking place at great distances and at other times. Such a miracle was repeatedly observed in many parts of the world, but as a rule, before the morning.
What is the reason for the appearance of such amazing phenomena? This is due to the amazing play of light and air. Here's how to understand it. When the air temperature is quite high, and it is higher at the surface of the earth than in higher layers, favorable conditions are created for the occurrence of mirages. The density of air decreases with increasing temperature, and vice versa. And, as you know, the denser the air, the better it refracts light. The rays falling from the sky have a blue spectrum, and some of them are refracted, while the other reaches human vision and forms an overall picture of the visible sky. The part of the rays that is refracted reaches the ground in front of the person, and, refracting against its surface, also fall into the field of vision of the person. We see these rays in the blue spectrum, which is why it seems that there is a blue reservoir ahead of us. This impression is reinforced by the heated air vibrating in front of us.
If a mirage occurs over the surface of the sea, then everything happens exactly the opposite. Below, above the surface of the water, the air temperature is lower, and higher with height. With such a combination of circumstances, upper mirages arise, in which we observe an image of an object in the sky.
The most famous mirage is an oasis in the middle of a hot desert, which is seen by tired travelers. No, this is not a dream, this is a real oasis, only it is located many kilometers from this point, and its image is just a projection of a picture that is transferred here by multiple refraction of light rays, under conditions ideally created for this.
Do not naively imagine that a mirage is a play of a sick imagination. Their appearance is confirmed by many photographs.

People have seen mirages since ancient times, about which many legends have survived. On the one hand, it is difficult to find a person who, at least once in his life, would not see the simplest mirage - a blue lake on a hot highway. On the other hand, thousands of people watched literally hanging cities, quaint castles and even whole armies in the sky, but here experts have no explanation for this natural phenomenon.

1. Mirages are of several types: lake, or lower; upper (they arise right in the sky) or distant vision mirages; lateral mirages. A more complex kind of mirage is called "Fata Morgana"

2. Lower (lake) mirage. Lower mirages occur mainly when the layers of air near the surface of the Earth (for example, in the desert) are so hot that the rays of light emanating from objects are strongly bent.

3. Caravans in the Erg-er-Ravi desert in North Africa are especially often the victims of mirages. Oases appear before people "with their own eyes" at a distance of 2-3 kilometers, to which, in reality, no less than 700 kilometers

4. Superior mirage (distant vision mirage)

The air heats up from the Earth's surface, and its temperature drops with height. However, if above a layer of cool air there is a warmer (brought, for example, by southerly winds) and highly rarefied air layer, and the transition between them is rather sharp, then the refraction increases significantly. The rays of light coming from objects on Earth describe a kind of arc and return downward, sometimes tens, even hundreds of kilometers from their source. Then there is a "rising of the horizon", or the upper mirage.

5. Residents of the French Riviera on a clear morning more than once saw on the horizon Mediterranean Sea where the water merges with the sky, the chain of the Corsican mountains rises from the sea, to which from the Cote d'Azur is about two hundred kilometers.

6. Fata Morgana is a complex optical phenomenon in the atmosphere, consisting of several forms of mirages, in which distant objects are seen repeatedly and with various distortions. For this, the most mysterious kind of mirages have not yet been found convincingly. But, there are many theories.

Mirages as an atmospheric phenomenon in nature

Mirages (from the French "mirage") are an optical phenomenon in the atmosphere, due to which images of objects appear in the visibility zone. normal conditions hidden from observation. Miracles of this kind happen because in an optically inhomogeneous atmosphere, the rays of light are bent, as if looking beyond the horizon. Most often, inhomogeneities arise due to uneven heating of air at different heights. V Ancient egypt believed that a mirage is the ghost of a country that no longer exists. Legend says that every place on our planet has its own soul.

More often, mirages can be seen in the desert. This can be explained by the fact that hot air acts like a mirror. For example, in the Sahara there are about 160,000 mirages every year; they are stable and wandering, vertical and horizontal.

In particular, caravans in the Erg-er-Ravi desert in North Africa often fall victim to mirages. Oases appear before people "with their own eyes" at a distance of 2-3 km, which are actually at least 700 km away. Mirage is capable of misleading experienced people as well.

So, 360 km from the Bir-Ula oasis, a caravan, led by an experienced guide from local tribes, fell victim to a mirage. 60 people and 90 camels were killed, following a deceptive mirage that carried them 60 km away from the well.

In ancient times, nomads, to make sure they see a mirage or real objects, kindled a fire. If there was even a slight movement of air in the desert, then the smoke spreading along the ground quickly dispersed the mirage. For many caravan routes, maps have been drawn up, on which the places of common mirages are indicated. These maps even indicate where wells, oases, palm groves are seen, mountain ranges etc.

Atmospheric mirages can be divided into three classes, and the reasons that cause them are quite varied.

First-class mirages are the so-called lake mirages, or lower mirages. They are the most common and simple ones. For example, water seen on desert sand or hot asphalt is a mirage of the sky over hot sand or asphalt. Plane landings in movies or car races on television are often filmed fairly close to the surface of hot asphalt. Then below the car or plane, you can see their mirror image (inferior mirage), as well as the mirage of the sky.

The higher you are on land or at sea, the less the air density. Under normal conditions, air density decreases with increasing altitude. When light passes over the surface of the earth, the air is denser below the light beam than above. A typical property of light is that it refracts towards a denser medium, so that a ray that travels along the surface of the earth is in fact always slightly refracted downward and travels along the slightly curved surface of the earth instead of heading straight towards the sky.

The denser air, as it were, slows down the lower end of the beam and pulls it towards itself. On the other hand, it seems to a person that the object is in the direction from which the light reaches his eyes. Thus, when you look at the distant horizon, you see objects that are actually partially below the horizon. Light from these objects is refracted along a curved, curved surface of the earth or sea, and therefore it only seems that the light reaches the eye of the observer from the horizon.

Many are familiar with the phrase that says that when we look at the sun as it sets, it is actually over the horizon. In astronomy, this phenomenon is known as refraction: the refraction of light in the atmosphere lifts celestial bodies on the horizon by about half a degree of an angle.

Very often, air density does not change evenly with altitude, and colder, denser air and warmer air form layers of different temperatures at different altitudes. The movement of light in such air can be quite erratic, thus creating a distorted image of the landscape.

The lower mirage is identical in structure: there is always only one inverted, more or less flattened mirage below the object. If the landscape itself is beautiful, then its mirage is also beautiful, and they can spread together on the horizon in a series of buildings and treetops.

If it happens in a desert, the surface of which and the adjacent layers of air are hot by the sun, the air pressure at the top can be high, the rays will begin to bend in the other direction. And then interesting phenomena will begin to occur with those rays that should, having reflected from the object, immediately buried in the ground. But no, they will turn upwards and, having passed the perigee somewhere near the very surface, they will go into it.

Imagine now that such a ray, already bent, enters the pupil of a traveler walking through the desert. But to subjective perception, the object (say, a palm tree) will be located in the place where the tangent to the ray path points. Accordingly, the image of a palm tree will be reversed, as if reflected in water. And a lot of water will spill around. Such an insidious joke will play with the thirsty traveler, the sky that has moved into the sands.

French scientist Gaspard Monge, who took part in Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, described his impressions of the lake mirage as follows: “When the earth's surface is very hot by the Sun and just begins to cool before dusk, the familiar terrain no longer extends to the horizon as in the daytime, but passes, as it seems, about a league in a continuous flood.

The villages further away look like islands in the middle of a lost lake. Under each village is its overturned image, only it is not sharp, small details are not visible, like a reflection in the water, swayed by the wind. If you begin to approach a village that seems to be surrounded by a flood, the coast of the imaginary water keeps moving away, the water arm that separated us from the village gradually narrows until it disappears altogether, and the lake now begins behind this village, reflecting the villages located further away. "

Anyone can observe the lower mirage. If on a hot summer day you stand on a railway track or a mound above it, when the sun is slightly to the side or side and slightly ahead railway track, then you can see how the rails 2-3 km ahead seem to plunge into a sparkling lake - as if the paths were flooded with a flood. If we try to get closer to the “lake”, it will move away, and no matter how much we go towards it, it will invariably be at the same deceptive distance.

Mirages of the second class - the rays of which are bent beyond the horizon line, are called upper, or distant vision mirages. They arise right in the sky. If warm air, heated somewhere above the desert, invades the upper layers of the atmosphere, and cold dense air of the anticyclone is below, then the rays that have undergone refraction can look very deeply beyond the horizon. Light reflected from a distant object (for example, an island) finds two paths to the eyes of the observer: the first passes almost directly from the island to the observer, and the second rises slightly upward to the warm air layer, where the ray refracts downward at a slight angle to the colder air and reaches the eye of the observer from above.

Two images of the same island are created - one is normal, and the second is an inverted image above the island, that is, the upper mirage. In turn, the specific type of atmospheric phenomenon that creates such a mirage is called thermal inversion. Then on the surface of the cold mass of air lies a clearly defined, lighter and less dense layer warm air... Severe thermal inversion also causes occasional interference to radio, television, and cell phones.

2006, May 8 - Thousands of tourists and locals watched a mirage that lasted for 4 hours in the city of Penglai off the east coast of China on Sunday. The fogs created an image of a city with modern high-rise buildings, wide city streets and noisy cars. It rained for 2 days in Penglai before this rare weather event occurred. Inhabitants of the French Riviera on a clear morning more than once saw how on the horizon of the Mediterranean Sea, where water merges with the sky, a chain of Corsican mountains rises from the sea, to which about 200 km from the French Riviera.

The upper mirage is described in one of the works of N.V. Gogol:

“A great miracle seemed to be behind Kiev! Suddenly it became visible far to all ends of the world. In the distance, the Liman turned blue, beyond the Liman the Black Sea was overflowing. Experienced people recognized the Crimea, rising like a mountain from the sea, and the marsh Sivash. By right hand Galician land was visible.

What is it? - interrogated the assembled people, pointing to the gray and white tops that seemed far away in the sky and looked more like clouds.

The Carpathian Mountains! - said the old people. "

Lateral mirages can occur when layers of air of the same density are located in the atmosphere not horizontally, as usual, but obliquely or even vertically. Similar conditions are created in the summer, in the morning shortly after sunrise near the rocky shores of the sea or lake, when the coast is already illuminated by the sun, and the surface of the water and the air above it is still cold. Lateral mirages have been repeatedly observed on Lake Geneva. For example, people saw a boat approaching the shore, and next to it, exactly the same boat was moving away from the shore. Side mirage can appear in stone wall at home heated by the sun, and even on the side of a heated stove.

Thanks to the lateral mirage, silent foggy ghosts appear, blocking the path of the traveler in the mountains. Usually, a frightened person sees himself. Strongly heated rocks cause such a rarefaction of air around them that the rays, reflected from the observer and directed to the rocks, bend near them to such an extent that, like a boomerang, they return back.

Images in side mirages are almost always equal in size to reflected objects, but they can double, triple, etc. There is a hypothesis that the famous ghosts, who have chosen some castles, are nothing more than a side mirage. In winter, as you know, damp damp walls must be intensively heated. The stones that make up the stoves are much more hot than boulders in the midday sun, and high vaulted ceilings allow the beam to loop and return to the observer.

Mirages of the third class are amazing mirages called ultra-long-range mirages. For them, distances of thousands of kilometers are not a hindrance. Here is the case described in the book "Optical Phenomena in Nature":

“On the night of March 27, 1898, among The Pacific the crew of the Bremen ship "Matador" was frightened by the vision. Around midnight, the crew noticed a ship about two miles away, battling a violent storm. This was all the more surprising since it was calm all around. The ship crossed the course of the "Matador", and there were moments when it seemed that the collision of ships could not be avoided ...
The crew of the "Matador" saw the light go out in the captain's cabin during one strong shock of the wave against the unknown ship, which could be seen all the time in two windows. After some time, the ship disappeared, taking the wind and waves with it. The matter was clarified later. It turned out that all this happened with another ship, which during the "vision" was from the "Matador" at a distance of 1,700 km. "

Class III mirages have no reliable scientific explanation. In order to somehow justify their appearance, it is suggested that giant aerial lenses are formed in the atmosphere or secondary, tertiary - multiple mirages that relay the same image along a complex chain appear. Some even try to prove that there is a special "mirror" in the ionosphere, from which the sunbeam, like a radio signal, is reflected and, simultaneously self-focusing, is carried away to another part of the light.

An interesting version is expressed by Victor Loisha: “Why not admit that under some very successful coincidences of many physical circumstances in the air, natural superconducting light guides can form, linearly oriented channels of anomalous ionization, through which light beams are transmitted over very long distances - for example, that the sunrise over Japan suddenly becomes visible, for example, in the Azores ... ".

Fata Morgana is a complex optical phenomenon in the atmosphere, which consists of several forms of mirages, in which distant objects are seen repeatedly and with various distortions. Fata Morgana appears when several alternating layers of air of different densities are formed in the lower layers of the atmosphere, capable of giving mirror reflections.

As a result of reflection, as well as refraction of rays, real-life objects give on the horizon or above it several distorted images, partially overlapping each other and rapidly changing in time, which creates a bizarre picture of this complex mirage. This phenomenon was named in honor of the heroine of legends - Fata Morgana. They say that she was a half-sister, but after the knight Lancelot rejected her love, she settled out of grief at the bottom of the sea, in a crystal palace, and since that time she has deceived seafarers with ghostly visions.

So, in the 1920s, a large ocean liner was on its next flight from Europe to the United States. And suddenly, not far from the Azores, everyone on the deck clearly saw "". The thought of a terrible ghost ship flashed through the minds of many passengers and sailors. And the unprecedented ship threatened to crash into the steamer. At the very last moment, the captain ordered in a loud, breaking voice to change the course of the ship. Leaning to starboard, the sailboat swept past. And at that time, the frightened, amazed passengers saw something even more amazing: people in old costumes rushed about the deck of the sailing ship.
They raised their hands up, screaming something soundlessly, as if they were trying to warn about something. It is clear that the passengers spent the rest of the voyage in fear of imminent death. Indeed, according to maritime belief, a meeting with a ghost ship does not bode well. When the steamer arrived at the port, the story of the Flying Dutchman was widely publicized. But later it turned out that the ocean liner met with the mirage of a sailing ship intended for the filming of a historical film and located in a completely different place.

Anyone who spends a lot of time in polar waters will certainly see mirages. For example, seasoned Finnish sailors and fairway connoisseurs know well that there are conditions that make it extremely difficult to find a familiar route among the confusing mirages on the rocky coastline. In Finland, conditions for mirages are especially favorable in the spring when the sea ice melts. A water temperature of 0 ° C with a spring wave of warm air with a temperature of 15 ° C can create incredible mirages in the sky.

Another example of an amazing atmospheric phenomenon took place in the Algerian desert, which was crossed by a French colonial detachment. Ahead, about six kilometers from him, a flock of flamingos walked in single file. But when the birds crossed the border of the mirage, their legs stretched out and doubled, instead of two, each had 4. Neither give nor take - an Arab rider in a white robe. The squad leader, alarmed, sent a scout to check what kind of people were in the desert. But when the soldier entered the zone of curvature of the sun's rays, he himself turned into a ghost mirage, and the legs of his horse became so long that it seemed as if he was sitting on a mythical monster.
One person in 1852 saw the Strasbourg bell tower in the sky, while the image was gigantic, as if the bell tower appeared in front of him 20 times magnified. In 1902, Robert Wood, an American scientist who not without reason earned the nickname "the magician of the physical laboratory", photographed two boys peacefully wandering between yachts in the waters of the Chesapeake Bay. Moreover, the height of the boys in the picture was more than 3 meters.

This kind of deception of mirages can also be explained by the deviation of light from rectilinear advance, in which the object is seen in the wrong direction or is distorted. Ghost mirages are usually visible on the horizon. The angle of mirages is very low, but they can be very different in shape. Bushes and stones on a small island can be perceived as towers in the sky; low rocky shores stretch vertically, and they resemble precipices; the ship and its deck superstructures can be distorted into unidentified square shapes, and the islands themselves seem to swirl in the air.

Mirage in French means "visibility" and is an optical phenomenon in the atmosphere that makes visible objects that are actually far from the place of observation, and display them in a distorted form or create a ghost image. This is one of the most interesting and amazing mysteries of nature. Let's find out more about them.

Mirages are of several types: lake, or lower; upper (they arise right in the sky) or distant vision mirages; lateral mirages. A more complex kind of mirage is called "Fata Morgana"

Lower (lake) mirage. Lower mirages occur mainly when the layers of air near the surface of the Earth (for example, in the desert) are so hot that the rays of light emanating from objects are strongly bent.

Superior mirage (distant vision mirage) The air heats up from the surface of the Earth, and its temperature drops with height. However, if above a layer of cool air there is a warmer (brought, for example, by southerly winds) and highly rarefied air layer, and the transition between them is rather sharp, then the refraction increases significantly. The rays of light coming from objects on Earth describe a kind of arc and return downward, sometimes tens, even hundreds of kilometers from their source. Then there is a "rising of the horizon", or the upper mirage.

Inhabitants of the French Riviera on a clear morning more than once saw how on the horizon of the Mediterranean Sea, where water merges with the sky, a chain of Corsican mountains rises from the sea, to which about two hundred kilometers from the French Riviera.

Fata Morgana is a complex optical phenomenon in the atmosphere, consisting of several forms of mirages, in which distant objects are seen repeatedly and with various distortions. For this, the most mysterious kind of mirages have not yet been found convincingly. But, there are many theories.

The word mirage comes from the French mirage, which has two similar meanings.

1. An optical phenomenon usually observed in deserts, consisting in the fact that, in addition to objects in their true position, their imaginary images are visible; with a mirage, objects hidden behind the horizon become visible; may be the result of the bending of light rays in unevenly heated layers of air;

2. Deceptive vision; something seeming, ghostly.

As you know, light propagates in a straight line only in a homogeneous medium. At the border of two media, the light beam is refracted, that is, it deviates somewhat from the original path. Such an inhomogeneous medium is, in particular, the air of the earth's atmosphere: its density increases near the earth's surface. The beam of light is bent, and as a result, the luminaries look somewhat displaced, "elevated" relative to their true positions in the sky. This phenomenon is called refraction (from Latin refractus - "refracted"). As a result of refraction, imaginary images of individual objects - mirages - can appear in the atmosphere.

People have seen mirages since ancient times, about which many legends have survived. Particularly colorful stories about the mirages of Palestine remained from the crusaders, whom, however, no one particularly believed. The knights really loved to lie about the wonders of the East. :))) The ancient Egyptians believed that a mirage was a ghost of a country that no longer exists in the world. A beautiful belief said that every place on Earth has its own soul. Centuries passed, and the tale lost its former meaning, turning into a natural phenomenon, about which everything is known and nothing at the same time.

On the one hand, it is difficult to find a person who, at least once in his life, would not see the simplest mirage - a blue lake on a hot highway. Opticians intelligibly, with a drawing and formulas, will tell about this phenomenon. On the other hand, thousands of people watched literally hanging cities, quaint castles and even whole armies in the sky, but here experts have no explanation for this natural phenomenon. It is almost impossible to study mirages, because they do not appear on demand. Their owner, Fata Morgana, is always original and unpredictable.

There are, relatively speaking, three types of mirages. Conditionally - because these atmospheric phenomena are very diverse in their form and for the reasons causing them.

Atmospheric mirages are divided into three classes: lacustrine, or lower; upper (they arise right in the sky) or distant vision mirages; lateral mirages.

A more complex kind of mirage is called Fata Morgana. It is customary to refer to a variety of mirages as werewolves, ghost mirages, "Flying Dutchmen".

Lower (lake) mirage

Lower mirages occur mainly when the layers of air near the surface of the Earth (for example, in the desert) are so hot that the rays of light emanating from objects are strongly bent. Having described an arc at the surface, they go from bottom to top. Then you can suddenly see trees and houses, as if reflected in the water. In fact, these are inverted images of distant landscapes.

If on a hot summer day you stand on a railway track or a mound above it, when the sun is slightly to the side or side and slightly in front of the railway track, then you can see how the rails two or three kilometers from us seem to plunge into a sparkling lake, as if the tracks were flooded flood. Let's try to get closer to the "lake" - it will move away, and no matter how much we walk towards it, it will invariably be 2-3 kilometers away from us.

Such "lake" mirages drove to despair the travelers of the desert, languishing with heat and thirst. They also saw the coveted water 2-3 kilometers away, wandered towards it with their last strength, but the water receded, and then it seemed to dissolve in the air.

French scientist Gaspard Monge, who took part in Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, describes his impressions of the lake mirage as follows:
“When the surface of the earth is very hot by the sun and just begins to cool before dusk, the familiar terrain no longer stretches to the horizon, as in the daytime, but turns, as it seems, about a league away into a continuous flood. islands in the midst of a lost lake.Under each village is its overturned image, only small parts not visible, like a reflection in the water, swayed by the wind. If you approach a village that seems to be surrounded by a flood, the coast of the imaginary water is all moving away, the water arm that separated us from the village gradually narrows until it disappears completely, and the lake now begins behind this village, reflecting the villages located further away. "

The nature of the lake mirage has been studied in detail. The sun's rays heat the soil, which heats up the lower layer of the air. It, in turn, rushes upward, immediately being replaced by a new one, which heats up and flows upward. Light rays are always bent from warmer layers towards colder ones. In physics, this phenomenon is called refraction and has been known since the time of Ptolemy. Rays from the bright sky near the horizon, heading towards the earth, bend up above it and reach our eye along an oblique bottom, as if reflecting from something above the earth itself. We see, of course, a piece of blue sky, only below where it really is. And the effect of shine and overflow is caused by the inhomogeneity of the streams of warm air rising from the hot surface.

Mirages lead to casualties. The physical explanation of the phenomenon of mirages does not in the least alleviate the fate of travelers, led by the ephemeral oasis into a fatal delusion. In order to save people brought into the desert from the risk of getting lost and dying of thirst, special maps are drawn up with a mark of places where mirages are usually observed. These guidebooks indicate where wells can be seen, and where - palm groves and even mountain ranges.

Caravans in the Erg-er-Ravi desert in North Africa are especially often the victims of mirages. Oases appear before people "with their own eyes" at a distance of 2-3 kilometers, to which, in reality, no less than 700 kilometers! So, 360 kilometers from the Bir-Ula oasis, a caravan led by an experienced guide fell victim to a mirage. 60 people and 90 camels were killed as they followed a mirage that carried them 60 kilometers away from the well.

Superior mirage (distant mirage)

This kind of mirages in their origin is not more complicated than the "lake" ones, but more varied. They are called "distant vision mirages".

In the same case, if the matter takes place in the desert itself, the surface of which and the adjacent layers of air are heated by the sun, the air pressure at the top may turn out to be high, the rays will bend in the other direction. And then already curious phenomena will occur with those rays that should, having reflected from the object, immediately buried in the ground. But no, they will turn upwards and, having passed the perigee somewhere near the very surface, they will go into it.

In Aristotle's Meteorology, a typical example is given of how the inhabitants of Syracuse sometimes saw the coast of continental Italy for several hours, although it is 150 km away. Similar phenomena are also caused by the redistribution of warm and cold air layers. in the direction of the last segment of the path of the light beam.

Side mirages

This type of mirages can occur when layers of air of the same density are located in the atmosphere not horizontally, as usual, but obliquely or even vertically. Such conditions are created in the summer, in the morning shortly after sunrise near the rocky shores of the sea or lake, when the coast is already illuminated by the Sun, and the surface of the water and the air above it is still cold.

Lateral mirages have been repeatedly observed on Lake Geneva. We saw a boat approaching the shore, and next to it exactly the same boat was moving away from the shore. A side mirage can appear at a stone wall of a house heated by the Sun, and even on the side of a heated stove. And the Dutch astronomer and popularizer of science Marcel Minnart suggested the following optical trick: “Stand against a long wall (at least 10 m) at arm's length and look at a shiny metal object, which your friend gradually brings to the wall at the other end. a few centimeters from the wall, its contours will be distorted, and you will see its reflection on the wall, as if it were mirrored. On a very hot day, there may even be two images. "

The nature of this mirage is exactly the same as that of the lake one. Of course, the rays of light are reflected not from the wall, but from the adjacent hotter layer of air.

Fata Morgana

If, for example, the Fraser-Mach theory is followed, then for the emergence of fata morgan it is necessary that the dependence of air temperature on altitude be nonlinear. At first, the temperature rises with height, but from a certain level, the rate of its growth decreases. A similar temperature profile, only with a steeper "fracture", scientists call an air lens. The existence of such an effect is justified by meteorologists, but it is too early to assert that it is he who is the cause of the occurrence of fata morgan.

The mirages got their name in honor of the fairytale heroine Fata Morgana or, translated from Italian, the Morgana fairy. They say that she is the half-sister of King Arthur, the rejected beloved of Lancelot, settled out of grief at the bottom of the sea, in a crystal palace, and since then has deceived sailors with ghostly visions.

In 1902, Robert Wood, an American scientist who not without reason earned the nickname "the magician of the physical laboratory", photographed two boys peacefully wandering between yachts in the waters of the Chesapeake Bay. Moreover, the height of the boys in the photo exceeded 3 meters.

One person in 1852 from a distance of 4 km saw the Strasbourg bell tower at a distance of, as it seemed to him, two kilometers. The image was gigantic, as if the bell tower appeared before him magnified 20 times.

In March 1898, at night, the crew of the Bremen ship "Matador" saw a strange haze while crossing the South Pacific Ocean. All this took place on the seventh bottle of the night, in other words, half an hour before midnight. A ship appeared on the leeward side, battling a storm. It was very strange because the water around the Matador was completely calm. But the sailboat seen from the "Matador" was filled with frantic waves, rolling over it. The captain of the "Matador" Herkins, in spite of the complete calm, ordered to reef all the sails, fearing that the unknown sailing ship would bring the wind ... Meanwhile, the sailing ship approached. It was carried in waves directly to the Matador. And suddenly the ship flew off in a southerly direction, taking with it a mysterious storm, and from the deck of the Matador one could see how the bright light in the captain's cabin suddenly went out. Later they learned that on the same night and at the same time one Danish ship really got into a storm, and a lamp exploded in its captain's cabin. When the time and degrees of longitude of the two ships were compared, it turned out that the distance between the "Matador" and another - Danish - ship at the time of the appearance of the mirage was about 1700 km.

Fata Morgana is a complex mirage. For such a mirage to occur, the dependence of temperature on altitude must be nonlinear; the temperature first increases with altitude, but from a certain level, the rate of its growth decreases. A similar temperature profile, only with a steeper break somewhere in the middle, can create a triple image mirage.

"Flying Dutchman"

Since ancient times, there has been a legend about the ghost ship - the Flying Dutchman. Its captain was convicted of blasphemy to forever rush across the seas and oceans, never dropping anchor. The meeting with this terrible sailing ship, according to the sailors, foreshadowed a shipwreck.

Many said that they saw this ship with their own eyes. At the same time, all the stories were similar: the Flying Dutchman suddenly appeared in front of the ships, completely speechless, sailed directly at them, not responding to signals, and then just as suddenly disappeared into the fog.

This old legend probably originated from the upper mirages. The sailors saw the reflections of distant ships, which under normal conditions are not visible, taking them every time for a mystical sailing ship.

At 11 o'clock in the morning on December 10, 1941, the team of the British transport "Vendor", located in the Maldives region, noticed a burning ship on the horizon. "Vendor" went to the rescue of those in distress, but an hour later the burning ship collapsed on its side and sank. "Vendor" approached the alleged place of the ship's sinking, but, despite careful searches, did not find not only any debris, but even spots of fuel oil. At the port of destination, in India, the commander of the Vendor learned that at the very moment when his team watched the tragedy, a cruiser was sinking, attacked by Japanese torpedo bombers near Ceylon. The distance between the ships at that time was 900 km.

So, if you believe this message, sometimes you can see what is hidden behind the distant horizon. But how is this possible?

How does light travel? A spoon in a glass of tea seems broken to us. Why? The reason lies in the different density of water and air. Passing from one medium to another - from less dense air to denser water, the rays of light are refracted, change the rectilinear path, and deviate towards a denser medium. This is the law of physics.

In the air, the rays of light are also not straightforward. When a ray of light from an air layer of one density hits a layer of a different density, it is deflected. Most often, the refraction of light rays in the air is insignificant, the images of visible objects are not displaced and are not noticeably distorted. But it also happens otherwise.

This is what the captain of a ship once observed near the North Pole. The ship was sailing among ice hummocks and fragments of ice fields, sparkling in the rays of the blinding sun. Suddenly, objects in the distance rose up and hung in the air. Huge ice mountains, snow fields with ice hummocks, undulating coast with hills appeared in front of the amazed sailors. An even more amazing picture was observed in 1878 by American soldiers from Fort Abraham Lincoln. Half an hour before this mirage, a detachment left the fort, and then they saw him marching in the sky! They started talking about the fact that the detachment was killed, these are the souls of the soldiers. Mystic? No!

In the air, under certain circumstances, "atmospheric mirrors" are formed. One of the layers of air acquires the ability to reflect light rays. This happens early in the morning, when the lower layers of the air are still very cold from contact with the ground, and the upper layers are warmer. Moreover, one of upper layers air begins to reflect from itself, like a mirror, everything that is on the earth's surface. In such conditions, you can see what is beyond the horizon. Distant islands, mountains, sailing ships appear in the air. So one traveler saw on the seashore in Italy an inverted image of an entire city, hanging in the air. Houses, towers, streets were clearly visible. Amazed, he hurried to sketch what he saw, and then, having walked several kilometers, went out to the very city, the image of which he had seen in the air earlier.

A closer example to us: forty kilometers from St. Petersburg, on the shores of the Gulf of Finland, is the city of Lomonosov. St. Petersburg is usually very poorly visible from here. However, there are days when the inhabitants of the city see it at a glance. His image appears in the air. Then from Lomonosov one can clearly see the reflection of the Neva River, bridges, tall buildings.

Werewolf Mirages

A French colonial squad crossed the Algerian desert. Ahead, about six kilometers from him, a flock of flamingos walked in single file. But when the birds crossed the border of the mirage, their legs stretched out and exfoliated, instead of two, each had four. Neither give nor take - an Arabian horseman in a white robe. The squad leader, alarmed, sent a scout to check what kind of people were in the desert. When the soldier himself entered the zone of curvature of the sun's rays, he, of course, figured out who he was dealing with. But ... here he has caught up with fear on his comrades! The legs of his horse became so long that he seemed to be sitting on a fantastic monster.

Other visions baffle us today. Let's open, for example, the book "Mirages of the Arctic" It describes a lot of mysterious and, in particular, werewolf mirages, which were observed by the Swedish polar explorer Nordenskjold: gait, zigzags and sniffing the air, wondering if foreigners are suitable for him for food, just at the moment of the sniper's sight ... he spread his gigantic wings and flew away in the form of a small green gull. in the tent, which was spread out for rest, they heard the chef screaming about her: “Bear, big bear! No - a deer, a very small deer "At the same instant, a shot rang out from the tent, and the killed" bear-deer "turned out to be a small arctic fox, who paid with his life for the honor of portraying a large beast for several moments."

Mirage ghosts

It is also reliably known about ghost mirages. This is how the British meteorologist Caroline Botley describes this effect: “I was picking flowers on a hot August day in 1962. Suddenly, a few meters away, I saw a figure, it was shaking and swaying, it was quite massive. I dropped a bouquet of flowers in horror and only then noticed, that the ghost also had a bouquet of flowers and he also dropped it. It was my own reflection. I could distinguish all shades, details, body color in such detail, as if I saw myself in a mirror. "

Despite the fact that Miss Botley is known throughout America as an expert on the weather, one would think that this time it is certainly a hallucination. But in 1965, an American tourist photographed a similar ghost. Since then, a dozen photos of ghost mirages and even one amateur video have appeared. Such phenomena usually occur in the morning, on a hot day, when steam is still rising from the ground. Scientists believe that ghosts are not caused by the refraction of light, but by reflection on a rare fog. But scientists cannot yet speak with confidence about the "mechanisms" that create mirages and ghosts. There are more guesses here than sound theories ...

Interesting cases of observing mirages

In the end, we would like to cite a few more interesting mirages. We have tried to arrange them in chronological order.

Scientist K. Flammarion in his book "Atmosphere" cites the testimony of the inhabitants of one Belgian city. Citizens of Verviers (name of the city) on July 18, 1815, on the day of the Battle of Waterloo (then Napoleon was defeated) saw armed men in the sky. It was even noticeable that one of the guns had a broken wheel! And this despite the fact that the battle took place 105 kilometers from Verviers.

In the old book "Daily Notes on Voyages to the Northern Whale Fishery, Containing Research and Findings on the East Coast of Greenland." refers to a large city, which was observed in the summer of 1820 by the commander of the ship "Baffin", full of castles and temples, very similar to ancient buildings. The sailor sketched this miraculous phenomenon in detail, but the evidence later, of course, was not confirmed.

Later, in 1840, the inhabitants of a small island north of England saw beautiful white buildings in the sky. Since there was nothing like this in their homeland, people considered this to be a confirmation of the tale of the Finn people who lived in the crystal city. The vision of a distant land was repeated 17 years later and hung in the air for three hours.

And on April 3, 1900, the defenders of the Bloemfontein fortress, in England, saw the battle formations of the British army in the sky, moreover, so clearly that it was possible to distinguish the buttons on the officers' red uniforms. This was taken as a bad omen. Two days later, the capital of the Orange Republic surrendered.

One of best places in the world for the study of mirages is Alaska. It was only in the 19th century that mirages appeared in these parts of the country. A special society for the study of natural optical phenomena has even been created here, which publishes a magazine for observing mirages, and tourists from Canada and the United States are taken on buses to admire the peaks of the gigantic mountains that appeared right from the abyss, which then dissolve.

In Alaska, the worse the cold, the clearer and more beautiful the souls of cities, mountains and various objects appear in the heavens. So, in 1889, a local resident, walking near Mount Fairweather, in the southeast of the peninsula, observed the silhouette of a large city - with skyscrapers, high towers and spiers, temples that looked like mosques. The source of the mirage could be thousands of kilometers from Alaska.

Something similar was recently observed by thousands of tourists off the east coast of China in the city of Penglai, Shandong province. The fogs have erected a city with modern high-rise buildings, wide city streets filled with people and fast cars. The mirage of high clarity was pleasing to the eye for four hours, and arose after torrential rains in the city for two days.

Experts in this field say that in the city of Penglai, located on the coast of the Shandong Peninsula, during the entire period of its existence, a sufficiently large number of mirages were recorded, which glorified the city as the home of the gods.

Mirages were recorded not only above the surface of the earth, but also above the surface of the oceans. Charles Lindbergh, a famous American pilot, made the first ever flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. According to the pilot, two hundred miles from Ireland, he saw the land: hills and trees. The vision did not disappear for several minutes.

Images of mirages were observed not only from airplanes, but even from space! Soviet cosmonaut Georgy Grechko photographed from board spaceship"Salute" to an ice floe that hung in the air above the clouds.

Mirages at our latitude are akin to anomalies, so this is a rare phenomenon. But if the summer is sultry, the wind has definitely died, then this natural phenomenon can also visit our firmament.

The sultry July was a match for the Goodwill Games. On the beach in Komarovo, everyone sat in the water, not on the shore. Somewhere in the beginning of the fourth, over the coastal part of the bay, not very high in the blue sky, a half-meter gray, slightly blurred circle formed. Vacationers froze: what is it? In a circle, as in a lens, the domes of a distant St. Isaac's Cathedral... Under the large circle, the smaller one shone, only upside down, from which the rainbow rays departed. Then the whole picture began to sparkle with all the colors of the rainbow and melted.

In the same summer, the whole Komarov family watched the mirage from the attic. country house in the village of Vaskelovo. The sultry evening did not bring relief, and so they decided with the whole family to go to bed in the hayloft. The windows and doors of the attic were wide open, and the entire horizon was clearly visible in the blue haze. In the west, the horizon suddenly turned unusually blue, and soon a clear blue stripe formed above the tops of the trees, and a blue village appeared just above it. With blue two-storey houses, streets, a small lake with bushes and trees hanging over it. The picture was by no means frozen - cars drove along the streets and people walked unhurriedly.

The summer preceding that was also not without mirages. Galina Sergeevna I. and Anna Ivanovna F. observed an almost mystical mirage from the windows of their house from the seventh floor. Galina Sergeevna's house is located on Kompozitorov Street, and the windows face Pargolov. The ladies drank tea and listened to Tchaikovsky's music. The owner of the apartment was the first to notice the horizon. A light golden cloud appeared there. Then it was replaced by a gray stripe, over which appeared ... crosses and gravestones. Later, a long alley with fir trees, crosses and a gray crypt turned green. Fortunately for the onlookers, the picture was blurry and short-lived, holding out for about a minute, after which it quickly melted. The gray, dilapidated crypt lingered in the sky the longest. Both ladies did not fall into mysticism and did not ask heaven for mercy. But I didn't want to listen to Tchaikovsky's music.