The Brockenspectre

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Working his way across a narrow precipice, the climber was startled by the sudden appearance in the nearby mists of a human figure with a ring of light around its head. A measurement carried out by the military staff of Prussia in 1850 found the Brocken's height to be at its present level of 1,141. Due to its significant height difference compared with the surrounding terrain the Brocken has the highest precipitation of any point in northern central Europe, with an average annual precipitation (1961–1990) of 1,814 millimetres (71. The first record of a placename that resembles the present name of the mountain goes back, however, to the year 1176 when it is referred to as broke in the Saxon World Chronicle ( Sächsische Weltchronik). The term has been popularly used throughout literature, mentioned in works by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll amongst others.

The sun shining behind the observer projects their shadow through the mist, while the magnification of the shadow is an optical illusion which makes the shadow on nearby clouds seem at the same distance at faraway landmarks seen through the cloud. If you were mountain climbing at a time of day when the sun was low and behind you, and if you climbed high enough to look down into a mist below you, you might witness the shadowy figure of the Brocken Spectre. Brocken station is one of the highest railway stations in Germany lying at a height of 1,125maboveNN (3,691ft). In James Hogg's novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) the Brocken spectre is used to suggest psychological horror.The ghost can appear to move (sometimes suddenly) because of the movement of the cloud layer and variations in density within the cloud. Slothrop and Geli Tripping experience the famous Brocken Spectre in Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow, as the Mittelbau-Dora labour camp in the Harz mountains north of Nordhausen from 1943 was the home of the V-2 rocket production. Two glories appear on the Great Seal of the United States: A glory breaking through clouds surrounding a cluster of 13 stars on the obverse, and a glory surrounding the Eye of Providence surmounting an unfinished pyramid on the reverse. ere yet Mr F appeared a misty shadow on the horizon paying attentions like the well-known spectre of some place in Germany beginning with a B .

A glory is an optical phenomenon, resembling an iconic saint's halo around the shadow of the observer's head, caused by sunlight or (more rarely) moonlight interacting with the tiny water droplets that comprise mist or clouds. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book. The Brocken spectre was observed and described by Johann Silberschlag in 1780, and has often been recorded in literature about the region. It’s your own shadow that you see, cast on the surface of the mists below, surrounded by a halo-like ring of light.

A theory by Brazilian physicist Herch Moysés Nussenzveig suggests that the light energy beamed back by a glory originates mostly from classical wave tunneling (synonymous in the paper to the evanescent wave coupling), which is an interaction between an evanescent light wave traveling along the surface of the drop and the waves inside the drop. The Brocken spectre is an optical phenomenon which appears when the sun shines from behind someone and casts a shadow upon clouds below. More Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by interacting with this icon. The wall has since been dismantled, as have the Russian barracks and the domes of their listening posts.