Saturday, July 05, 2008

The Sun has been practicing the moon illusion


This was taken June 26, about 8:00 PM daylight time. As you can see, not yet sunset. But the sky was very smoky, and it was possible to look right at the sun, which looked overall orange. And, as it neared the horizon, it looked very large, like a harvest moon.

For a couple of things about the moon illusion:

http://illusionsetc.blogspot.com/2005/11/moon-optical-illusion.html

http://www.lhup.edu/%7Edsimanek/3d/moonillu.htm

One of them mentions that the sun does it too, except that we can't look directly at the sun, usually. Well, that day it was smoky enough that we could. Here it was large and orange. Some places, the smoke caused a lavender sun, as at Arcata over on the coast. Wish I'd seen that.

http://yubanet.com/scitech/Unusually-widespread-haze-is-causing-a-rare-atmospheric-optics-phenomenon---the-lavender-sun_printer.php

A couple of days later, it was a surprise to see real light and shadows again, it'd been so long.

It's getting smoky again.

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