an aside

Ive been reading and looking at photos of spectres and glories and in particular the spectre of brocken which occurs when well...here i will steal someone elses words:

"A spectre of the Brocken occurs when the observer casts his or her shadow on a wall of fog. (The) fog has no smooth (real) surface, so that it causes three-dimensional pictures which move in a spooky way by the waving of the fog, although the observer does not move at all.

Sometimes there forms a colourful, annular optical phenomenon around the "head" of the spectre of the Brocken, which is called a glory. This glory is caused by backward scattering and diffraction of the sunrays by the very small fog droplets. The rays of light become diverged by the small round droplets into a pattern of concentric circles."

here is a picture I also didn't take..



if you google image search brocken spectre you can see more - Im kinda obsessed.

here is a website called The nonist that has a little history and photo collection on it as well