Thu, 22 Mar 2007
Glory
An article in the Chinese press talks about a phenomenon known as Buddha 's Light. This is nothing other than a well understood atmospheric phenomenonknown as the glory or brokenspecter. Like the rainbow, it's caused by light refracted through water drops.
A glory is only visible when sunlight is at the observer's back; therefore, they are always exactly opposite the sun, centered on the antisolar point. A glory will appear if that light entering into a cloud or fog bank is scattered or reflected backward to an observer's eye. Diffraction of the light bends the returning light rays slightly as they pass around the edges of uniformly-sized cloud water droplets. Interference among overlapping, returning waves produces light and dark bands that form the glory. Dark bands in the glory rings result from destructive interference when overlapping rays have their waveforms 180 degrees out of phase, and as a result, the low portion of one wave cancels the high portion of another
