I never have…for you who are curious, it is an optical effect that you can see at dawn or sunset, if you are:
-at the peak of a mountain
-have fog or clod banks behind you
The suns rays project your shadow onto the clouds…and you shadow outline is tremendously magnified by the distance. I’m told it can be quite spectacular.
Unfortunately, I’ll probably never visit Germany (where the mountain (the Brocken) is located…but where should I look for a similar place?
Supposedly, the effect was first notices by the poet Goeth, about 200 years ago.
It’s a “Glory”, and I see them all the time. The most common place to see one is when you’re flying. You can see one around the shadow of the plane you’re in. It looks like a very small, tight, completely circular rainbow, and is due to interference between rays counterpropagating along the same paths, but different directions.
I’m sure you can find plenty of pictures on the internet by Searching under “glory” with appropriate qualifiers. There’s a famous picture of the Spectre of the Brocken (which is a glory seen around the shadow of the observer’s head on the cloudbank in the valley below the observer) in M. Minnaert’s classic book The Nature of Light and Color in the Open Air, but people today think he fudged the shot. See also other books on such optical phenomena – Greenler’s book Rainbows, Haloes, and Glories, R.A,R. Tricker’s Introduction to Meteorological Optics, and the relevant sections in Jearl D. Walker’s The Flying Circus of Physics
** ralph 24c ** Why will you probably never visit Germany?
I can assure you it is a beautiful and so clean you wouldn’t believe it.
Make the effort, get your ass over there and if possible time it in order to see The Passion Play at Oberamergau…fantastic.
Oh BTW there are not a lot of jackbooted thugs marching around these days.
“country” :smack:
Why the hell must one travel to Germany to see a phenomena that can be observed from a mountain in America?
You have the Passion Play in the States as well? gee! I never knew that 
Yes, we have a passion play… it’s called professional wrestling.
I’d love to visit another country, but I’m very much afraid of becoming a hostage or terrorism victim. Americans aren’t very popular these days.
I think there’s a pic of this phenomenon (the “glory”) at the Astronomy Picture of the Day site. A related phenomenon is a sun dog, which I’ve seen from a jetliner. It looks like a UFO is pacing the plane.