What is a Brocken Spectre?
The Brocken spectre is a bewitching optical phenomena that occurs when a low-lying sun casts a very long shadow into mist or fog in the distance. The effect creates a supersized shadow figure, which looks three dimensional because of the depth at which the shadow descends into the mist. The Brocken spectre is also frequently accompanied by a difficult-to-explain optical effect known as a glory, a rainbow halo that appears when light is refracted from uniformly sized airborne water droplets. The Brocken spectre gets its name from a mountain peak called The Brocken, part of the Harz Mountains in Germany. The gently-sloping hills and frequent fog in this area makes the phenomenon easy to observe when conditions are right. The Brocken spectre was first described by Johann Silberschlag in 1780, but the phenomenon has probably been observed by confused humans ever since prehistoric times. It is unexplainable phenomena such as this that may have originally caused people to start thinking that
How did we choose the name of our publishing company? A Brocken Spectre (sometimes called an anthelion) is a beautiful meteorological phenomenon consisting of the observer’s shadow with its head completely surrounded by a rainbow. It is often seen beneath them by mountaineers climbing out through the top of a cloud layer. The Sun casts their shadow on the clouds and the moisture in them diffuses the light into brilliantly-coloured rings or haloes. The author of King of Siluria and Strata has frequently seen the phenomenon from an aircraft flying just above a cloud layer. The name derives from the mountain called Brocken in the Harz range in Germany. The subject of King of Siluria, Roderick Murchison, climbed it in 1828 and again in 1854 (his sixty-third year), in search of fossil beds older than the lowest Devonian.
