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Reflected rays in windows

On 18th February 2014 at about 8:25 AM local time I observed a thick but shallow fog which streched to the altitude of 30-50 meters from the surface. I was photographing the fog from the top of an 11 story building when I noticed the strange reflections by some windows. (1234)

The building where the phenomenom was formed was about 250 meters from me in the NW direction, just opposite the Sun which was SE, behind me at an altitude of 15 degrees, just above the fog layer.

The location was Budapest, Hungary.

Author: György Répás

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Reflected Crepuscular Rays

IMG_6792.jpg

In the evening of April 18, 2012, I observed some light rays from 2962 metres high Mt Zugspitze [1]. These rays did not emanate from the sun which at the moment I took the photograph was above the rays under the cloud layer. And there were bright reflections of the sun on the ground indicating that there must have been a large lake [2].

Taking a look at the map I realized that Lake Constance was in that direction, but there were no reports that it is visible from Mt Zugspitze. Just the bright reflections of sunlight made it possible to recognize it. The surface of 536 square kilometres large Lake Constance, the third largest lake in Europe, reflected the sunlight scattering it towards me. The shadows of the mountains between me and Lake Constance were projected upon the cloud layer from below creating this wonderful natural spectacle.

A similar observation can be found here: Reflected sunray

Author: Claudia Hinz, Germany

Reflected sunray

It was the 21st of June in 2010, when I came back from work in the evening and prepared my photo equipment for some time-lapse experiments of the very intensive sunrays currently shining. I was late and just wanted to get one last visual impression from my balcony before walking down to the river and shooting the pictures. What I saw was pretty amazing, so that it took some seconds to get the camera working.

The reflected sunray remained for 50s since my first view. I took 4 pictures of it and made a small animation. The occurrence of that common sunray on the same cloud baseline seems to be at random, due to the fact that the reflected ray moves with reduced speed.

Some discussions revealed that the river itself could not cause the mirror effect, because the surface of running water is too unsettled and not plane enough to produce such a shapely reflection. A calm and wind-protected surface is the harbour basin in a distance of about 3km in the direction of the sun. Further waters in that direction are more distant (>10km).

I kept an eye on comparable situations to get these reflections again, but without success so far. You should be watchful on the following conditions:
– intensive sunrays of course
– low altitude of the sun (to get long distanced rays)
– dark clouds in the short distance (to get the contrasts)

Place : Dresden, Germany
Time : 21 June 2010
DSLR Camera : Canon EOS 1000 D
Exposure : 1/80 sec, f/55mm, F/7.1, ISO 200

Author: Eik Beier, Dresden, Germany