One of the remarkable phenomena that I’ve noticed over the last week that I will never see at home relates to lights and ice in the air.
As I described in an earlier post, you get the fairy dust effect when its nice and cold and the water in the air is turning to crystal.
Over the weekend I noticed another effect that people had told me about but that I hadn’t seen (well until now obviously). When the air gets this cold and you have crystals in the air, some of the powerful lights that are about the place (like floodlights used to light up parking areas of industrial complexes) end up with a vertical column of light above them.
It’s kind of like a spot light has been directed vertically above the light post. When I was first told about it, I was informed that what it actually is, is a reflection of the light on the snow/ice beneath it that then lights up the crystals in the air. Regardless of how it actually occurs, its amazing to see these spearing columns of light shooting into the night air above the light posts. I doubt I could capture it on camera, but it’s something that I won’t forget.
2 comments:
These are slightly more officially called light pillars and they can indeed be photographed: example, another.
Thanks for the comment, at least I now know what they're called! And maybe I'll try and photograph them.
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