Munich Süddeutscher Verlag Tower Sunrays in Fog and “Ghost Windows”

A lot of discussions went on before the SV-Tower was built. The headquarters of the publisher “Süddeutscher Verlag” was originally designed to be a 145 metres high 39-story building, but had to be limited to 100 metres (28 stories) after a popular petition in Munich.

It was built between 2006 and 2008, when in September the SV employees rather unwillingly moved to their unloved new workplace.

There were several discussions on the visual appearance of the new high-rise building. Some considered it as a boring square log, while others admired the special feature of its storefront.

This storefront consists of a straight inward and a prismatic outward glazing. As the individual panes of the outer storefront are inclined to each other, they reflect landscape and sky alternately. So, depending from the incidence of light and the observer´s position, the appearance of the tower changes permanently. The inner glazing is normally not important here.

Already in 2010, a friend showed me an unsharp photograph taken from his mobile phone, which showed sunrays in dispersing fog around the SV Tower. Although I pass the building almost every morning, it took five years until I could experience this phantastic light show myself.

Hoping to be lucky this time, I took my camera with me on my way to work on November 3, 2015. The tour didn´t start very promising, as there was no fog around Munich. But when I reached the fairground east of the city, some fogbanks appeared, which already had started to disperse. Above them, the sun was shining, and so I got more and more excited. Should I really be lucky today?

Short before the end of the A94 motorway, the SV Tower  provided a stunning show with its reflected sunrays in the fog. Just a few hundred metres further I took an exit and went back on a road parallel to the motorway. From a parking lot I could watch and photograph the permanently changing sunrays.

Intensity, direction and appearance of the rays constantly changed when I changed my position and the wafts of mist moved. And even the inner glazing played a role now, because the light caroming the straight inner glazing becomes reflected parallely. This caused an effect of “ghost windows” in the fog.

When I started my observation at about 9.50 a.m., the fog was still relatively thick. At about 10.25 a.m., the fog had completely dispersed and the show was over.

Author: Rainer Timm, Munich, Germany

Corona around reflection of Sun

In the evening of June 6, 2014, a reflection of the sun appeared in an inclined window pane of the pyramid-shaped restaurant building on the top of Mt. Zugspitze, while shreds of cumulus clouds coming from the valley passed by. In these shreds not only the shadow of the top of the building was visible from time to time, but there also appeared a distinct corona around the reflection of the sun.

Author: Claudia Hinz

Deformed Glory

Matěj Grék placed a strong halogen lamp somewhere around 20m away and take some photos from a fogbow. He noticed that the glory was deformed. The wind was strong in this night, the fog was moving quite fast, and with the fog of course also tiny water droplets. Maybe that’s why the glory is deformed in connection with divergent light. Images are taken with a polarization filter.

Camera: Nikon D60; F/6,3; f/30mm; t=30sec. at ISO 200

Author: Matěj Grék & Michael Großmann, Kämpfelbach, Germany

Fog shadow of TV tower in San Francisco

These fascinating shadows look odd since humans are not used to seeing shadows in three dimensions. The thin fog was just dense enough to be illuminated by the light that passed through the gaps in a structure or in a tree. As a result, the path of an object shadow through the “fog” appears darkened. In a sense, these shadow lanes are similar to crepuscular rays, which are caused by cloud shadows, but here, they’re caused by an object shadows.

Author: Mila Zinkova