Okay, here’s the deal: As I’m driving down the highway, I can see the hood of my car. Since it is buffed to such a beautiful sheen, I can see reflections in the hood as I’m driving. It’s these reflections I can’t figure out. I can see a reflection of the stripes and other markings on the road. How can an image of the road passing in front of and under my car end up appearing on the hood on top of my car?
I hope my question makes sense. Knowing that angle of reflection equals angle of incidence, I cannot see how the angles add up to the road appearing on the hood of my car from my perspective in the driver’s seat. Obviously, they do, but I just don’t get it.
What kind of car do you have? Is the hood slanted towards to road? If so then you are catching the images on the hood from several meters out I’d say.
Related/Unrelated story. Whilst dricing to Arizona last year in my wife’s silver Jetta we stopped at a wonderful sunset in Kansas. I took a picture of the sunset and the completely reflected off her hood causing it to appear almost perfectly circular. from the top clouds/sun/horizon = bottom = horizon/sun/clouds. Amazing.
Could be a hologram. You can end up “encoding” your polishing utensil on your hood with all the closely spaced scratches. (See here.) That’s my only guess what it could be.
Your car hood isn’t a flat surface, its kind of like one of those funhouse mirrors. Try using a Christmas ball and you’ll see some-what the same effect.
It works like this - the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection, but the reflective surface is inclined away from you, so the upper limit of your cone of sight (represented by the green ray) is still below the horizon (in this example, anyway - if your hood is less inclined, you’ll see less of the road and more of the sky).
Note that the rays cross, so the image is inverted - if you are able to see the reflection of the sky, it will be at the part nearest to you.
