**** Info via Environment Canada
Brocken Spectre
If you ever get the chance to experience a Brocken spectre, you quickly understand why people describe the appearance as both a heavenly and spooky shadow.
A Brocken spectre – the large, dark shadowy figure – shown within “Glory” (a rainbow effect).
A Brocken spectre, also called Brocken bow or mountain spectre is the enormously magnified shadow of an observer cast upon the clouds or mist opposite the Sun’s direction (i.e., the sun is behind the back of the observer). The phenomenon can appear on any misty mountainside, cloudbank, or even from an airplane. Halo-like rings of coloured light – called “Glory” – often surround the shadow. These “rainbow rings” appear (again, opposite the Sun’s direction) when uniformly sized water droplets in the clouds refract and backscatter sunlight.
Airplane flying with Brocken Spectre.
The “spectre” appears when the sun shines from behind the observer, who is looking down from a ridge or peak into mist or fog. The apparent magnification of size of the shadow is an optical illusion that occurs when the observer judges their shadow on relatively nearby clouds to be at the same distance as faraway land objects seen through gaps in the clouds, or when there are no reference points by which to judge its size. The ghostly shadow can also appear to move (sometimes suddenly) because of the movement of the cloud layer.
The phenomenon takes its name from the Brocken, a peak in the Harz Mountains in Germany. This region is known for frequent fogs. Johann Silberschlag, a German Lutheran theologian and natural scientist, is said to have first described the Brocken Spectre in 1780. It has since figured in many stories about the region and elsewhere.
