Gowrishankar Lakshminarayanan caught this photo on March 12, 2017. But it's an example of why training for a big hike is just as much fun as the big hike itself.Īnyone else familiar with these odd sightings? If so, I'd love to hear about it. The shadow of the plane is called a brocken spectre, and the ringed light around the shadow is called a glory. If you are lucky, you will see a glory around the aircrafts shadow - as shown. A Brocker spectre even appeared from space in 2003, aboard the space shuttle Columbia. When sunlight shines on water droplets in clouds, a circular rainbow forms around the plane’s silhouette as it passes in front of the sun. In fact, in the second photo, I'm holding my hiking poles up with my left hand to make it clearer.Ĭoincidence? No fogbows, no spectres for years and then three sightings in a row? No idea. 2 A Brocken Spectre seen in October 2000 by Dave Newton in Grisedale. Airline passengers occasionally witness Brocken spectre-like glories. The shadow in the center of the rainbow is none other than me. ![]() Then, this morning, in addition to my third fogbow, and in the same location at the same time, I saw the Brocken Spectre on Valencia Peak. I had no idea what the phenomenon was, or what to call it. I looked down at a plane flying below us, and saw it surrounded by a rainbow. I noted that I actually had seen the spectre once, while on a commercial flight. You can see this very often when flying on a plane, youll see the silhouette of the plane in the clouds with the rainbow. ![]() I Googled the spectre and decided that what I had seen fit more into the fogbow category, judging mostly on the fact that the fogbow is pretty close to colorless. A Brocken spectre (German: Brockengespenst), also called Brocken bow or mountain spectre, is the magnified (and apparently enormous) shadow of an observer cast upon clouds opposite of the Suns direction. She said what I was calling a fogbow was actually called Spectre of the Brocken. I put my fogbow photos up on Facebook, and soon after heard from my old friend Shannon, who I knew in my Hearst Castle Tour Guide days. ![]() This morning I took a third trip up the peak, and not only saw a third fogbow, but an odd phenomenon that I had never heard of until a handful of days ago. A couple weeks later I hiked Valencia again. Here's what I found.īut this is where it gets more interesting (in my mind anyway). I thought I was being tongue-in-cheek by making up that name, until I Googled fogbow. But I saw a fogbow a few weeks ago, the first of three times I hiked Valencia Peak after a break of a year or so. In fact, I had no idea there was any such thing as a fogbow. But until a few weeks ago, I had never seen a fogbow. I've probably hiked Valencia Peak in Montana de Oro State Park four dozen times since I started hiking seriously in 1993.
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