For David Morris, it was a typical trip last month along the rocks along England’s southwest coast: his terrier, a sunny rider, passing by ships on the horizon.
But a ship felt a little out of place. It appeared Above The horizon, as if floating on the sea, is suspended in the air.
“I told myself, ‘It must be on the water,'” said Mr. Morris, a 52-year-old property developer who lives near Garol, the southernmost point in mainland Britain. “My head doesn’t want to understand that, but it should be on the water.”
Mr Morris said he did not expect any stir on social media when he posted a photograph showing a floating ship on his Facebook account. “It’s just a picture of a boat,” he said in a telephone interview.
But, of course, it wasn’t. Now, a lot of people are trying to wrap their heads around a picture that seems impossible.
What Mr. Morris said he saw is an example of a miraculous illusion known as an excellent mirage, which occurs when the temperature difference between the sea and the air changes the density of the air and forces the sun to rotate around the horizon.
Cold air usually sits on top of hot air – the more a chummy goes, the colder it gets. But on that sunny morning in Cornwall last month, the situation was reversed: cold air was blowing over a sea of chili, with hot air over it.
The contrast of temperature produced the mirage. The light coming from the ship towards Mr. Morris was again reduced, as meteorological conditions created air layers with varying temperatures, making light travel through them at different speeds.
The ship looked higher than that, as the human brain – and as it turns out, the camera – cannot process the effects of different temperatures on how images are perceived.
(Hang in there.)
Light usually travels to the eyes through straight lines, allowing them to see things directly, said Dr. A.S. Said Claire Sisowski.
But, she said, “Sometimes an image changes when the rays of light reaching us pass through different layers.”
This is what happens when you look at the water: a glass of water straw or a hand dipped in the sea may get out of the setting, as light travels through the air and water at different speeds.
The same principle applies to the cornwall with the ship, except that instead of moving from the water to the air, the light moved from the air to the air, said Dr. C. Sisowski.
“Air is not always the same – whether it is hot or cold, it has different properties.” “So just as light travels differently through these different levels, our brains try to understand it.”
In Mr. Morris’s experience, since the cold air was softer than the hot air, the light rays coming from the ship turned downwards. From the shore, it seemed to Mr. Morris that the ship was in a higher position than it really was.
“When light reaches our eyes, it can’t be pulled back as if it had been twisted the whole way,” Dr. Sisowski said. “So we create an image as if it’s coming from a straight line, because our eyes want to lengthen what they see.”
Dr. According to Sisowski, like the eye, the camera can’t recreate that bent ball. “It looks like a ray of light is also coming from a straight line.”
Isn’t this the first time the Pitkel illusion has gone viral on the internet, and the floating ship hasn’t gained a reputation as a blue-black dress – or was it golden and white? – Done in 2015. At least, not yet.
Mr Morris said this was not the first time he had seen what a floating ship looked like, although the BBC’s David Brain said. Short video What happened was very unusual. “It is quite unusual to see such an optical illusion in British waters, but it happens very rarely,” he said.
Superior mirage is more common in the Arctic, where it occurs because the temperature difference between sea and air causes a similar change in air density with a higher frequency.
But people are more used to them: inferior meerkats. When a warm surface sits on top of warm air and causes cold air, the rays of light are turned upwards, making the viewer look like a water lake in the desert or a mirage on the road in the desert.
In Cornwall, Mr Morris said he had not paid much attention to the leviting ship – the Meribel, which was off the coast of France until Saturday and would reach New York on Tuesday.
Instead, he marveled at the landscape around him as he began to walk again.
He said, “I said to myself, ‘How lucky we are in this part of the world.’
Mike Ives and Shannon Hall contributed to the reporting.
