A Hall of Mountain Fogbows

Explanation: If you tried to enter this hall of fog, you would find it dissipates around you. The hall is actually an optical illusion created by sunlight backscattering off of a cloud passing below the peak of the mountain from which this picture was taken. Known as a fogbow and similar in some ways to “the glory ”, the phenomenon is sometimes seen from airplanes . The ring's center appears near the image bottom where the shadow of the photographer is visible. This shadow would likely change as clouds passed, creating a faux moving giant known as the Brocken Spectre . In the picture , several concentric rings of the fogbow appear to create a hall for this mountain king . The cause of fogbow supernumeraries arcs and glories have only been understood recently and are relatively complex. Briefly , small droplets of water reflect , refract , and diffract sunlight backwards towards the Sun. Atmospheric backscattering phenomena have a counterpart in astronomy, where looking out from planet Earth in the direction opposite the Sun yields a bright spot called the gegenschein .