Atmospheric phenomenon mirage. Mirage - when nature deceives

Mirage (French mirage - literally visibility) is an optical phenomenon in the atmosphere: the reflection of light by the boundary between layers of air that are sharply different in density. For an observer, such a reflection means that together with a distant object (or part of the sky), its virtual image is visible, shifted relative to the object.

Mirage is an atmospheric phenomenon due to which, under certain circumstances, objects become visible in a certain area, the actual location of which is far from the place where they are observed by the viewer. It is explained by the complete reflection of rays at the boundary of two layers of air having different temperatures, if the light ray falls with a very strong inclination onto the boundary plane. If the viewer and the distant object are at only slightly elevated points and between them lies sandy soil strongly heated by the sun, imparting its heat to the nearest layers of air and thereby heating them more strongly than the layers located above, the viewer sees the object in its actual position through the rays, directly from object going towards it, and secondly, in an inverted position, through rays, first coming from the object downwards, then, when meeting warmer and therefore rarer layers of air, being reflected and going to the eye of the observer, seeing the object as if reflected in the water.

Gaspard Monge

This explanation was given by the French mathematician and geometer Gaspard Monge in the "Mémoires de l" Institut d "Egypte". If a very heated warm layer is not below, but above the observer and the observed object, located in a denser cold layer, the Mirage phenomenon can also occur, but only in the upward direction. Thus, those observed in an overturned form above the horizon, for example, ships, towers, castles, etc., are images of real objects. In some areas, in Naples, Reggio, on the shores of the Strait of Sicily, on large sandy plains (in the morning, when the lower layers of air are still colder than the upper layers, already warmed by the sun), in Persia, Turkestan, Egypt, this phenomenon called Fata Morgana is observed often. In the second case, such refraction may occur, but the object appears only raised, but not inverted, and thus complete reflection does not occur in the upper layers themselves. In this form, this phenomenon is observed in the western parts of the Baltic Sea (Kimmung). In the accompanying fig. 1 curved line L means the path of rays in the first case, when the lower layers of air are less dense than the upper ones; SS is a layer that gives total reflection.

The observer at A receives from the object G, in addition to the direct image, a reflected image G1, which is observed in the direction of the tangent (to the line L) drawn from point A. Figure 2 represents the case when colder and denser layers lie below.

Through rays L traveling without reflection, observer A receives a raised, standing image G1 of object G, but if the rays are curved along line L2 and are completely reflected by the layer SS, then an inverted image G2 is obtained.

Encyclopedic Dictionary of F. A. Brockhaus and I. A. Efron. - St. Petersburg: Brockhaus-Efron. 1890-1907.

The ancient Egyptians believed that a mirage was the ghost of a country that no longer exists. Legend says that every place on Earth has its own soul. Mirages observed in deserts are explained by the fact that hot air acts like a mirror. This phenomenon is quite common - for example, about 160 thousand mirages are observed annually in the Sahara: they can be stable and wandering, vertical and horizontal.

On May 8, 2006, thousands of tourists and local residents observed a mirage that lasted for four hours in Penglai off the east coast of China on Sunday. The fogs created an image of the city, with modern high-rise buildings, wide city streets and noisy cars. It rained for two days in the city of Penglai before this rare weather event occurred.

It is almost impossible to study mirages, since they do not appear on order and are always original and unpredictable. According to scientists, the atmosphere is like a layered, airy cake, which consists of layers with different temperatures. And the greater the temperature difference, the more the path of the light beam is bent. In this case, it is as if a giant airy lens is formed, which moves all the time. In addition, the observed object and the person himself are inside this air lens. Therefore, the observer sees the image distorted. The more complex the shape of the atmospheric lenses, the more bizarre the mirage.

Atmospheric mirages are divided into three classes: lower or lake; upper (they appear directly in the sky) or distant vision mirages; lateral mirages. A more complex type of mirage is called Fata Morgana. No explanation has yet been found for it. The types of mirages include the aurora borealis, werewolf mirages, and the “Flying Dutchmen.”

Lower (lake) mirage

Mirage over an asphalt road

This is not a type of aircraft :). It's about the heat and the "reflection" from the asphalt. Planes appear as if out of nowhere.

Inferior mirage. Reflection of an airplane on the asphalt

Mirage (mirror-like surface of water) in the Arabian Desert

If on a hot summer day you stand on the railway track or a hill above it, when the sun is slightly to the side or to the side and slightly in front of the railway track, then you can see how the rails two or three kilometers away from us seem to be plunging into a sparkling lake, as if the tracks were flooded flood. Let's try to get closer to the "lake" - it will move away, and no matter how much we walk towards it, it will invariably be 2-3 kilometers away from us. Such “lake” mirages drove desert travelers, languishing from heat and thirst, to despair. They also saw the coveted water 2-3 kilometers away, they wandered towards it with all their strength, but the water receded and then seemed to dissolve in the air.

The French scientist Gaspard Monge, who took part in Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, describes his impressions of the lake mirage as follows: “When the surface of the earth is strongly heated by the Sun and is just beginning to cool before the onset of twilight, the familiar terrain no longer extends to the horizon as during the day, but turns, as it seems, at about one league into a continuous flood. The villages located further away look like islands in a lost lake. Under each village there is an overturned image of her, only it is not sharp, small details are not visible, like a reflection in water, swayed by the wind. If you begin to approach a village that seems to be surrounded by a flood, the shore of the imaginary water moves away, the water arm that separated us from the village gradually narrows until it disappears completely, and the lake now begins behind this village, reflecting the villages located further away.”

Superior mirage or distant vision mirage

Observed over the cold earth's surface with an inverted temperature distribution (air temperature increases with increasing altitude). Superior mirages are generally less common than inferior mirages, but are often more stable because cold air does not tend to move upward and warm air downward. Superficial mirages are most common in polar regions, especially on large, flat ice floes with stable low temperatures. They are also observed at more temperate latitudes, although in these cases they are weaker, less distinct and less stable. The superior mirage can be upright or inverted, depending on the distance to the true object and the temperature gradient. Often the image looks like a fragmented mosaic of straight and inverted parts.

Superior mirages can have a striking effect due to the curvature of the Earth. If the curvature of the rays is approximately the same as the curvature of the Earth, the light rays can travel great distances, causing the observer to see objects far beyond the horizon. This was observed and documented for the first time in 1596, when a ship under the command of Willem Barentsz, searching for the Northeast Passage, became stuck in the ice on Novaya Zemlya. The crew was forced to wait out the polar night. Moreover, the sunrise after the polar night was observed two weeks earlier than expected. In the 20th century, this phenomenon was explained and called the New Earth Effect.

In the same way, ships that are actually so far away that they should not be visible above the horizon can appear on the horizon, and even above the horizon, as superior mirages. This may explain some stories of ships or coastal cities flying in the sky, as described by some polar explorers.

A normal-sized ship is moving over the horizon. Given a specific state of the atmosphere, its reflection above the horizon appears gigantic.

On a clear morning, residents of the Côte d'Azur of France have seen more than once how, on the horizon of the Mediterranean Sea, where the water merges with the sky, the chain of Corsican mountains rises from the sea, about two hundred kilometers from the Côte d'Azur. In the same case, if this happens in the desert itself, the surface of which and the adjacent layers of air are heated by the sun, the air pressure at the top may turn out to be high, the rays will begin to bend in the other direction. And then curious phenomena will occur with those rays that, having reflected from the object, should have immediately buried themselves in the ground. But no, they will turn upward and, having passed perigee somewhere near the surface itself, will go into it. A typical example is given in Aristotle's Meteorology: residents of Syracuse sometimes saw the coast of continental Italy for several hours, although it was 150 km away. Such phenomena are also caused by the redistribution of warm and cold layers of air in the direction of the last segment of the path of the light beam.

On April 20, 1999, an ordinary charterer was practicing in the waters of the southwestern archipelago of Finland. The vessel took many different forms; sometimes it seemed there were 2 ships, one of which was upside down.

House on the archipelago with the upper mirage

Side mirage

The existence of a side mirage is usually not even suspected. This is a reflection from a heated vertical wall. Such a case is described by one French author. Approaching the fort of the fortress, he noticed that the smooth concrete wall of the fort suddenly shone like a mirror, reflecting the surrounding landscape, soil, and sky. Taking a few more steps, he noticed the same change with the other wall of the fort. It seemed as if the gray, uneven surface was suddenly replaced by a polished one. It was a hot day, and the walls must have become very hot, which was the key to their specularity. It turned out that a mirage is observed whenever the wall is sufficiently heated by the sun's rays. We even managed to photograph this phenomenon.

This type of mirage can occur in cases where layers of air of the same density are located in the atmosphere not horizontally, as usual, but obliquely or even vertically. Such conditions are created in the summer, in the morning shortly after sunrise, on the rocky shores of the sea or lake, when the shore is already illuminated by the Sun, and the surface of the water and the air above it are still cold. Lateral mirages have been repeatedly observed on Lake Geneva. We saw a boat approaching the shore, and next to it exactly the same boat was moving away from the shore.

The once famous lateral (side) mirage, observed in 1869 by Captain Coldway, who visited the shores of Greenland with an expedition on the ship "Germany"

Mirage of Fata Morgana

Fata Morgana is a complex optical phenomenon in the atmosphere, consisting of several forms of mirages, in which distant objects are visible repeatedly and with various distortions. Fata Morgana occurs when several alternating layers of air of varying densities are formed in the lower layers of the atmosphere, capable of producing specular reflections. As a result of reflection, as well as refraction of rays, real-life objects produce several distorted images on the horizon or above it, partially overlapping each other and quickly changing in time, which creates a bizarre picture of Fata Morgana.

On April 3, 1900, the defenders of the fortress of Bloemfontein, in England, saw the battle formations of the British army in the sky, and so clearly that they could distinguish the buttons on the red uniforms of the officers. This was taken as a bad omen. Two days later the fortress surrendered.

In 1902, Robert Wood, an American scientist who not without reason earned the nickname “the wizard of the physics laboratory,” photographed two boys peacefully wandering through the waters of the Chesapeake Bay between yachts. Moreover, the height of the boys in the photograph exceeded 3 meters.

One man in 1852, from a distance of 4 km, saw the Strasbourg Bell Tower at a distance, as it seemed to him, of two kilometers. The image was gigantic, as if the bell tower appeared before him enlarged 20 times.

Fata Morganas also include numerous “flying Dutchmen”, which are still seen by sailors. In March 1898, at night, the crew of the Bremen ship Matador, while crossing the South Pacific Ocean, saw a strange haze. A ship jumped out of it and rushed straight towards the Matador. Then it disappeared somewhere. On the seventh bell of the night, that is, half an hour before midnight, a ship fighting the storm again appeared on the leeward side. It was very strange, because around the Matador the water was completely calm. But the sailboat seen from the Matador was flooded by furious waves, rolling over it. The captain of the "Matador" Gerkins, despite the complete calm, ordered all the sails to be reefed, fearing that the unknown sailing ship would bring the wind with it... Meanwhile, the sailing ship approached. The waves carried him straight towards the Matador. And suddenly the ship flew away in a southerly direction, taking with it a mysterious storm, and on the Matador the bright light in the captain’s cabin suddenly went out, which everyone saw through two windows, until the mysterious ship disappeared. Later they learned that on the same night, during a strong storm, a lamp exploded in the captain's cabin of another ship. When the time and degrees of longitude of the two ships were compared, it turned out that the distance between the Matador and the other Danish ship at the time the mirage appeared was about 1,700 km.

At 11 a.m. on December 10, 1941, the crew of the British transport Vendor, located in the Maldives, noticed a burning ship on the horizon. "Vendor" went to the rescue of those in distress, but an hour later the burning ship fell on its side and sank. "Vendor" approached the supposed place of the ship's death, but, despite a thorough search, did not find not only any debris, but even stains of fuel oil. At the port of destination, in India, the commander of the Vendor learned that at the very moment when his team observed the tragedy, a cruiser was sinking, attacked by Japanese torpedo bombers near Ceylon. The distance between the ships at that time was 900 km.

One of the possible explanations, as well as the origin of the name "Flying Dutchman", is associated with the phenomenon of Fata Morgana, since the mirage is always visible above the surface of the water. It is also possible that the glowing halo is St. Elmo's fire. For sailors, their appearance promised hope for success, and in times of danger, for salvation. Currently, methods have been developed that make it possible to obtain such a discharge artificially.

Fata Morgana

This image shows how the Fata Morgana changes the shape of the two ships. The four photographs in the right column are of the first ship, and the four photographs in the left column are of the second.

A chain of changing mirages.

The mirage got its name in honor of the fairy-tale heroine Fata Morgana or, translated from Italian, the fairy Morgana. They say that she is the half-sister of King Arthur, the rejected lover of Lancelot, who settled out of grief at the bottom of the sea, in a crystal palace, and since then has been deceiving sailors with ghostly visions.

Morgana the Fairy, by E. F. Sandys, 1864, Birmingham Art Gallery

Morgana (Morgana le Fay), who is portrayed as a purely evil force, schemed against Arthur to steal his talisman, the sword Excalibur, in order to somehow overthrow him. At the same time, she served him well: when Arthur was mortally wounded at the Battle of Camlen, she was one of the four queens who convinced Arthur to leave for the Isle of Avalon, where she used her magic to save her brother's life. She is sometimes described as a goddess, but in fact the image of Morgana is a composite and comes from various Celtic myths and deities. In Welsh folklore, she was considered one of the lake fairies who seduce and then abandon people in love with them; in Irish folklore, she lived in a magical mound, from where she flew out in frightening outfits and frightened people. In English and Scottish folklore, Morgana lives either in Avalon or in various castles, including one near Edinburgh that was inhabited by a pack of evil fairies. She is also considered one of the sea maidens of the coast of Brittany, who are called Morgans, Mary Morgan or simply Morgan. These sirens lure sailors. Depending on the story, the sailor either goes to his death or is transported to a blessed underwater paradise. In Italy, mirages over Strato from Messina are still called Fairy Morgana. Morgana is sometimes portrayed as an angry, decrepit old woman, as in the stories of Sir Lancelot, the Lake and Gawain and the Green Knight. However, she is not the "Lady of the Lake" in the Arthurian legend cycles. According to stories, Morgana had an insatiable sexual appetite and constantly lured knights to satisfy her passion. As Marion Bradley, a novelist who writes on occult themes, has pointed out, Morgana the Fairy was a girl under the Lady of the Lake, a Druid priestess who studied dragon magic at the Druid College for Priestesses.

Volume mirage

In the mountains, very rarely, under certain conditions, you can see the “distorted self” at a fairly close distance. This phenomenon is explained by the presence of “standing” water vapor in the air.

Auroras

Faraway, cold Alaska has long been recognized as the champion of mirages. The stronger the cold, the clearer and more beautiful the visions appear in her sky. The appearance of mirages in those parts began to be constantly recorded only in the 19th century. Now a special scientific society has been created in Alaska for the study of natural optical phenomena. And tourists are taken on buses to admire how mountains rise straight out of the abyss on the flat ocean horizon, and then disappear to God knows where.

Mirage ghosts

A French colonial detachment was crossing the Algerian desert. Ahead, about six kilometers from him, a flock of flamingos walked in single file. But when the birds crossed the border of the mirage, their legs stretched out and separated, instead of two, each had four. Neither give nor take - an Arab horseman in a white robe.
The detachment commander, alarmed, sent a scout to check what kind of people were in the desert. When the soldier himself entered the zone of curvature of the sun's rays, he, of course, figured out who he was dealing with. But he also struck fear into his comrades - the legs of his horse became so long that it seemed that he was sitting on a fantastic monster.

Other visions still baffle us today. The Swedish polar explorer Nordenskiöld more than once observed werewolf mirages in the Arctic: “One day a bear, whose approach was expected and which everyone could clearly see, instead of approaching with his usual soft gait, zigzags and sniffing the air, wondering whether strangers were suitable for him as food, just at the moment of the sniper’s sight... spread his gigantic wings and flew away in the form of a small green seagull. Another time, during the same sleigh ride, the hunters, being in a tent pitched for rest, heard the cry of the cook fiddling around it: “Bear, big bear! No - a deer, a very small deer." At the same moment, a shot was heard from the tent, and the killed "bear-deer" turned out to be a small arctic fox, who paid with his life for the honor of pretending to be a large animal for a few moments."

It is also reliably known about ghost mirages. Here's how British meteorologist Caroline Botley describes this effect: “Mirages lead to victims, but the physical explanation of the phenomenon of mirages does not in any way alleviate the fate of travelers misled by the ephemeral oasis. In order to protect people brought into the desert from the risk of getting lost and dying of thirst, special maps are drawn up marking the places where mirages are usually observed. These guides indicate where wells can be seen, and where palm groves and even mountain ranges can be seen."

It rained for two days in the city of Penglai before this rare weather event occurred.

Atmospheric mirages divided into three classes: lower or lake; upper(they appear directly in the sky) or distant vision mirages; lateral mirages.
A more complex type of mirage is called " Fata Morgana". No explanation has yet been found for it. The aurora borealis, werewolf mirages, and the “Flying Dutchmen” are usually classified as types of mirages.

Lower (lake) mirage

Inferior mirages are quite common. For example, water seen on desert sand or hot asphalt is a mirage of the sky above the hot sand or asphalt. Airplane landings in movies or car races on television are often filmed very close to the surface of hot asphalt. Then below the car or plane you can see their mirror image (inferior mirage), as well as the mirage of the sky. By the same principle, if you look at an object, for example, along a wall heated by the sun, then you can almost always see a mirage of the object next to the wall.

Such “lake” mirages drove desert travelers, languishing from heat and thirst, to despair. They also saw the coveted water 2-3 kilometers away, they wandered towards it with all their strength, but the water receded and then seemed to dissolve in the air.

In the photo, the sailboat almost disappears into the lower mirage. Only the sail is visible.

Lighthouse Isokari

The lower mirage and the ship's mirage.

Superior mirages (distance vision mirages)

This type of mirages is no more complex in origin than “lake” ones, but more diverse. They are usually called "distant vision mirages".

In the same case, if this happens in the desert itself, the surface of which and the adjacent layers of air are heated by the sun, the air pressure at the top may turn out to be high, the rays will begin to bend in the other direction. And then curious phenomena will occur with those rays that, having reflected from the object, should have immediately buried themselves in the ground. But no, they will turn upward and, having passed perigee somewhere near the surface itself, will go into it.

A typical example is given in Aristotle's Meteorology: residents of Syracuse sometimes saw the coast of continental Italy for several hours, although it was 150 km away. Such phenomena are also caused by the redistribution of warm and cold layers of air. in the direction of the last segment of the path of the light beam.

Boat against a background with a typical superior mirage

On April 20, 1999, an ordinary charterer was practicing in the waters of the southwestern archipelago of Finland.
The vessel took many different forms; sometimes it seemed there were 2 ships, one of which was upside down.

Superior mirage and sailboat.

House on the archipelago with the upper mirage

Side mirages

Fata Morgana

The mirage received its name in honor of the fairy-tale heroine Fata Morgana or, translated from Italian, the fairy Morgana. They say that she is the half-sister of King Arthur, the rejected lover of Lancelot, who settled out of grief at the bottom of the sea, in a crystal palace, and since then has been deceiving sailors with ghostly visions.

TO Fata Morgana can be attributed to numerous " flying dutchmen ", which are still seen by sailors.

Mirage ghosts

The detachment commander, alarmed, sent a scout to check what kind of people were in the desert. When the soldier himself entered the zone of curvature of the sun's rays, he, of course, figured out who he was dealing with. But he also struck fear into his comrades - the legs of his horse became so long that it seemed that he was sitting on a fantastic monster.

Other visions still baffle us today. The Swedish polar explorer Nordenskiöld has repeatedly observed in the Arctic werewolf mirages:

"One day, a bear, whose approach was expected and which everyone clearly saw, instead of approaching with his usual soft gait, zigzags and sniffing the air, wondering whether foreigners were suitable for him as food, just at the moment of the sniper's sight... spread gigantic wings and flew away in the form of a small green seagull. Another time, during the same sleigh ride, the hunters, being in a tent pitched for rest, heard the cry of a cook fiddling around it: “A bear, a big bear! No - a deer, a very small deer.” At the same moment a shot was heard from the tent , and the killed “bear-deer” turned out to be a small arctic fox, who paid with his life for the honor of pretending to be a large animal for a few moments".

It is also reliably known about mirages-ghosts. This is how British meteorologist Caroline Botley describes this effect.

Mirages lead to victims, but the physical explanation of the phenomenon of mirages does not in the least alleviate the fate of travelers misled by the ephemeral oasis. In order to protect people brought into the desert from the risk of getting lost and dying of thirst, special maps are drawn up marking the places where mirages are usually observed. These guides indicate where wells can be seen, and where palm groves and even mountain ranges can be seen.

Caravans in the Erg-er-Ravi desert in North Africa are especially often victims of mirages. People see oases “with their own eyes” at a distance of 2-3 kilometers, which are actually at least 700 kilometers.

People have seen mirages since ancient times, about which many legends have been preserved. On the one hand, it is difficult to find a person who, at least once in his life, has not seen the simplest mirage - a blue lake on a hot highway. On the other hand, thousands of people have observed literally hanging cities, quaint castles and even entire armies in the sky, but here experts have no explanation for this natural phenomenon.

The contact surface, like a mirror, reflects the lush vegetation of an oasis in the waterless desert, which is located very far away. Likewise, on the highway, the sky is reflected in puddles that are not really there.

Mirages in the Sahara Desert

In the Sahara Desert A huge number of mirages are observed every year. Sometimes mirages deceive even very experienced caravan guides. So, in the middle of the 20th century, 60 people and 90 camels died in the desert. The caravan chased a mirage, which took it 60 kilometers away from the well. Now even special maps of mirages have been compiled, marking the places where and what phenomena are usually observed.

A rare form of mirage, when complex and rapidly changing images of objects appear on the horizon - Fata Morgana. A mirage is an image of a real-life object, often enlarged and greatly distorted. It can be sketched, photographed, filmed.

There are several types of mirages: upper, lower, lateral, complex.

The first two are the most common, and they are caused by a sharp decrease in air density with height.

Inferior mirages occur when there is a relatively thin layer of very warm air near the surface. Rays from ground objects on the border with it experience total internal reflection. Such a warm layer of air plays the role of a kind of air mirror.

Conditions favorable for the appearance of inferior mirages are usually realized in steppes and deserts, in sunny and windless weather. This state is extremely unstable, because highly heated, and therefore lighter, air is located below, under a layer of colder and heavier air.

Superior mirages occur when air density rapidly decreases with altitude. The image is obtained above the object.

Mirages are a common phenomenon not only in hot deserts, but also in cold Arctic territories. The main thing is the unevenly heated layers of air, which are present in abundance in these corners of the Earth. Depending on the location of the layers of the “sandwich”, mirages are of two types - lower and upper. The most famous mirage, the desert one, is called the lower one. It appears when a layer of hotter air forms at the surface of the earth. It is clear that most often they occur in the desert, when the sun heats the earth to the point of a hot frying pan. But it is not at all necessary to go to the desert in order to see such a mirage - on a sunny summer day there are plenty of them in our middle zone, just look at the asphalt. Yes, these small “puddles” that appear in the haze on the highway are nothing more than a real lower mirage.

Sources: fotokto.ru, www.liveinternet.ru, otvet.mail.ru, www.stihi.ru, www.bugaga.ru

Out-of-body experience

Psychometrics and intuitives

Nai - goddess who devours memory

Church of Progress

Combat lasers in space

Easter Island statues

Easter Island is a small piece of land in the Pacific Ocean between Chile and Tahiti, formed as a result of the eruption...

Modern car engines

“The efficiency of heat engines” - Can firearms be classified as heat engines? Achievements of science and technology in the construction of steam turbines. Environmental...

Airplane Su - 30SM, characteristics

The aircraft was developed by the Sukhoi Design Bureau and is produced at the Irkutsk Aviation Plant, a branch of OJSC Irkut Corporation. The Su-30SM two-seat fighter is super-maneuverable, equipped...

Pool handrails

One of the important elements of any pool are handrails. Of course, you can do without them, but in this case the level of comfort and...

Do vampires exist in real life?

According to conventional wisdom, vampires are people who once cheated death by drinking the blood of another person, and therefore must continue to drink blood in order to remain immortal. ...

A cybernetic organism will be created

The idea of a cyborg appears in science fiction shortly before World War II. The term was coined by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S....

Everything for beauty

Every girl or woman has days when her health is not very good and her appearance would also like to be better. What...

Strategic bomber PAK DA

The new promising strategic bomber PAK DA is taking shape. According to published data, the development of design documentation by the Tupolev Bureau has been completed and...

Video of a recent mirage in China. Almost all buildings are an optical illusion

May 8, 2006 Thousands of tourists and locals watched a mirage that lasted for four hours in Penglai off China's east coast on Sunday. The fogs created an image of the city, with modern high-rise buildings, wide city streets and noisy cars.

It rained for two days in the city of Penglai before this rare weather event occurred.

Atmospheric mirages are divided into three classes: lower or lake; upper (they appear directly in the sky) or distant vision mirages; lateral mirages.
A more complex type of mirage is called Fata Morgana. No explanation has yet been found for it. The types of mirages include the aurora borealis, werewolf mirages, and the “Flying Dutchmen.”

Lower (lake) mirage

- water - mirage

Superior mirages (distance vision mirages)

This type of mirages is no more complex in origin than “lake” ones, but more diverse. They are usually called "distant vision mirages."

On April 20, 1999, an ordinary charterer was practicing in the waters of the southwestern archipelago of Finland.
The vessel took many different forms; sometimes it seemed there were 2 ships, one of which was upside down.

- House on the archipelago with the upper mirage

Side mirages

This type of mirage can occur in cases where layers of air of the same density are located in the atmosphere not horizontally, as usual, but obliquely or even vertically.
Lateral mirages have been repeatedly observed on Lake Geneva. We saw a boat approaching the shore, and next to it exactly the same boat was moving away from the shore. A side mirage can appear near a stone wall of a house heated by the Sun, and even on the side of a heated stove.

Fata Morgana

Fata Morganas also include numerous “flying Dutchmen”, which are still seen by sailors.

Mirage ghosts

A French colonial detachment was crossing the Algerian desert. Ahead, about six kilometers from him, a flock of flamingos walked in single file. But when the birds crossed the border of the mirage, their legs stretched out and separated, instead of two, each had four. Neither give nor take - an Arab horseman in a white robe.

Other visions still baffle us today. The Swedish polar explorer Nordenskiöld more than once observed werewolf mirages in the Arctic:

“One day a bear, whose approach was expected and which everyone could clearly see, instead of approaching with his usual soft gait, zigzags and sniffing the air, wondering whether strangers were suitable for him as food, just at the moment of the sniper’s sight... spread his gigantic wings and flew away in the form of a small green seagull. Another time, during the same sleigh ride, the hunters, being in a tent pitched for rest, heard the cry of the cook fiddling around it: “Bear, big bear! No - a deer, a very small deer." At the same moment, a shot was heard from the tent, and the killed "bear-deer" turned out to be a small arctic fox, who paid with his life for the honor of pretending to be a large animal for a few moments."

It is also reliably known about ghost mirages. Here's how British meteorologist Caroline Botley describes this effect:

Caravans in the Erg-er-Ravi desert in North Africa are especially often victims of mirages. People see oases “with their own eyes” at a distance of 2-3 kilometers, which in reality are at least 700 kilometers away.

1. Mirages come in several types: lake, or lower; upper (they appear directly in the sky) or distant vision mirages; lateral mirages. A more complex type of mirage is called Fata Morgana.

2. Lower (lake) mirage. Inferior mirages occur primarily in cases where the layers of air near the surface of the Earth (for example, in a desert) are so heated that the rays of light emanating from objects are strongly bent.

3. Caravans in the Erg-er-Ravi desert in North Africa are especially often victims of mirages. People see oases “with their own eyes” at a distance of 2-3 kilometers, which in reality are at least 700 kilometers away

4. Superior mirage (distance vision mirage)

The air is heated from the Earth's surface, and its temperature drops with height. However, if above the layer of cool air there is a warmer (brought, for example, by southern winds) and very rarefied air layer, and the transition between them is quite sharp, then the refraction increases significantly. Rays of light coming from objects on Earth describe something like an arc and return down, sometimes tens, even hundreds of kilometers from their source. Then a “raising of the horizon” or superior mirage is observed.

5. On a clear morning, residents of the Côte d'Azur of France have seen more than once how on the horizon of the Mediterranean Sea, where the water merges with the sky, the chain of Corsican mountains rises from the sea, about two hundred kilometers from the Côte d'Azur.

6. Fata Morgana is a complex optical phenomenon in the atmosphere, consisting of several forms of mirages, in which distant objects are visible repeatedly and with various distortions. No convincing explanation has yet been found for this most mysterious type of mirage. But, there are many theories.