Posts by Lilith __
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to Paul Campbell,
here’s a map ….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:New_Zealand_transmission_grid.svgthat line you’d like to put in would go through Fiordland Nat Park – roughly where they are arguing about monorails and the like at the moment
Wait, are we talking about the proposed monorail from Glenorchy to Milford? That’s a long way from a line between Manapouri and whatever that other near point is (Cromwell?) Lake Manapouri is very near the inner edge of Fiordland Nat Park.
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Capture: Someone, Somewhere, In Summertime, in reply to Jos,
Aw, thanks Jos! I think your piwakawaka is particularly fine. :-)
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Capture: Someone, Somewhere, In Summertime, in reply to Jos,
A lovely lisianthus
Here is a rose that had just dropped its petals. One minute the petals were all hanging on, then I looked again, and they’d fallen in a drift.
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Capture: Got the blues, in reply to BenWilson,
I’m interested too. Feel free to take this off-line (we’ve got each other’s emails), unless anyone else is interested to hear about this.
I think I'm all out of wild speculations, actually. ;-)
Could that yacht really be beyond the horizon? <boggle> -
Capture: Got the blues, in reply to BenWilson,
Which is not to say there isn’t mirage effect there. I’m sure there is, because it can be seen in this shot, containing Little Barrier Island, which is something like 50-80km beyond. You can see the corner is floating. But notice that this floating is also above the height of the decks of the boat on the horizon, but that is reasonably clear and undistorted. This suggests the mirage effect is happening mostly beyond that point.
Mirages can be horizontally discontinuous, depending on the local temperature gradients in the air between objects and viewer. This is a very dramatic example. Obviously your picture is all sea, but that needn’t mean that the air is the same temperature all over. Or, as you say, it could be different further towards the Island.
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Capture: Got the blues, in reply to BenWilson,
Sorry Ben, I don't mean to be a pain about this, but I'm really fascinated. Would you care to send it off to Les and see what his thoughts are? I've found him very responsive to questions.
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Capture: Got the blues, in reply to BenWilson,
the middle boat is all sails. They’re stretched a bit, I think, but not enough to hide the entire hull, which is quite large (it was a much larger vessel than the other two, several kilometers further away). It was below the horizon, which is only about 5km away from me standing with my feet in the water.
5km seems a pretty sort distance for you to be seeing the earth curve.
The thing with mirages is that they usually work by stacking inverted and upright images, not by stretching. So I presume the boat with all sails and no hull has maybe more than one layer of mirage. Mirages, as here, can make portions of an object seem to disappear.
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Capture: Got the blues, in reply to BenWilson,
You had me wondering for a second. All three are on exactly the same tack. But here’s one taken from higher up about 45 mins earlier (ain’t having a clock in your camera great!), of the same three sailboats, and it’s clearer that they are all distinct vessels.
You will be viewing on a different angle to the air layers from higher up. I think the one on the right in the first image is clearly affected with an inverted mirage: the ropes below the sail are impossibly long. I'm puzzled by the middle one as it's so close to the boat on the left, but assume the same mechanism is distorting its appearance.
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Capture: Got the blues, in reply to BenWilson,
Amazing shot. I wonder if we’re seeing a mirage, though?
ETA: this sort of thing.
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Lost in the dunes at dusk, south of Dunedin. The thistles were taller than me!
