The Giant and the Glory

Explanation: On a flight from Vienna to Brussels, astronomer Franz Kerschbaum looked out the window and photographed this beautiful atmospheric phenomenon, the glory , shining in the direction directly opposite the Sun. Before airplanes , the glory, known to some as the heiligenschein or the Specter of the Brocken , was occasionally seen from mountaintops. There, when conditions were right, one could look away from the Sun and see what appeared to be the shadow of a giant surrounded by a bright halo . Of course, the giant turns out to be the observer, and in the modern version a silhouette of a plane frequently occupies the glory's center. The cause of the glory is relatively complex. Briefly , small droplets of water reflect , refract , and diffract sunlight backwards towards the Sun. The phenomenon has a counterpart in astronomy, where looking out from planet Earth in the direction opposite the Sun yields a bright spot called the gegenschein .