File:Swimming Moon.jpg
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Captions
Summary
editDescriptionSwimming Moon.jpg |
English: This photo montage shows a familiar cosmic object — the Moon — in a very unfamiliar way.
ESO Photo Ambassador Petr Horálek captured this photoset while visiting ESO’s high-altitude Paranal Observatory in Chile, where skies are remarkably clear. He snapped photographs of this striking blood-red moonset at five-second intervals, watching as the Moon sank through the dark sky before finally dipping below the horizon (the frames are ordered chronologically from left to right, and top to bottom). The prominent red colour of these images is due to the phenomenon of atmospheric refraction. As the Moon approaches the horizon, its reflected light must traverse more and more of the atmosphere before reaching our eyes, meaning that scattering becomes more prominent — in other words, there is more air for the light to push through, and more light is scattered. Of all the colours of visible light, the Earth’s atmosphere scatters and refracts red light the least due to its longer wavelength, casting sunsets and moonsets in a characteristic orange-red hue. Alongside the colour, the other notable feature of this image is the apparent rippling effect — the Moon appears to be melting! Again, this is an atmospheric effect; light rays are here unusually and unevenly refracted by layers of air with different densities, temperatures, pressures, humidities, and so on. The shape of the Moon also appears flattened due to the lensing power of the atmosphere, which pushes the lower sections upwards to create an oval or egg-like shape. These phenomena are all caused by differential refraction — essentially, each layer of the Earth’s atmosphere deals with the Moon’s light differently, resulting in this distorted, belted effect. |
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Source | http://www.eso.org/public/images/potw1828a/ |
Author | P. Horálek/ESO |
Licensing
editThis media was created by the European Southern Observatory (ESO).
Their website states: "Unless specifically noted, the images, videos, and music distributed on the public ESO website, along with the texts of press releases, announcements, pictures of the week, blog posts and captions, are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, and may on a non-exclusive basis be reproduced without fee provided the credit is clear and visible." To the uploader: You must provide a link (URL) to the original file and the authorship information if available. | |
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
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Metadata
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Credit/Provider | P. Horálek/ESO |
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Source | European Southern Observatory |
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Date and time of data generation | 15:33, 24 May 2118 |
Keywords | Moon |
Contact information |
Karl-Schwarzschild-Strasse 2 Garching bei München, , D-85748 Germany |
IIM version | 4 |