Credit: Reddit/ @LSD25hoffmans-potion
Incredible Optical Illusion Makes Boat Appear Like It’s Floating In The Sky
If you’ve ever been walking along the beach and looked out to sea, only to spot what appears to be a boat floating in mid-air, you’re not alone.
In fact, the phenomenon of ‘hovering’ ships is actually more common than you might think, but that doesn’t make seeing it any less spectacular.
There have been a number of seemingly floating boats spotted across the world, from the UK’s Cornwall, to Greece and even here in the United States.
But before you think you’ve suddenly uncovered the lesser known mode of transportation known as the flying boat, you should know, it’s actually a very clever optical illusion known as Fata Morgana.
The Flying Dutchman legend
Cast your mind back to history class, to one of the world’s most famous ghost ship legends: The Flying Dutchman.
As those who remember the tale will know, the story originates back to Dutch and British sailors during the 17th and 18th centuries, when European ships regularly sailed around a particularly dangerous stretch of ocean around the south of Africa, known as the Cape of Good Hope.
Though the tale has been retold in many forms, the most commonly told story involves a Dutch captain called Hendrick van der Decken, who was trying to sail around the Cape during a nasty storm.
Although his crew begged him to turn the ship back, he refused and for this he was cursed by God to sail the oceans for eternity, meaning the ship could never reach its destination nor return home.
Now, back to the floating ships. Many people believe the legend may have been inspired by Fata Morgana, as these ‘floating’ ships could easily be mistaken for a ghost ship.
ships appear to float over the water
by u/Ashish_ank in confusing_perspective
What is a Fata Morgana?
That leads us nicely to what a Fata Morgana actually is. Well, it is actually a highly complex form of superior mirage, which is caused by the way the light bends as it passes through layers of air of differing temperatures.
Though similar to an inferior mirage, like when you see what appears to be water shimmering on a road during a hot day, a Fata Morgana happens when cold, dense air sits underneath warmer air.
“Superior mirages occur because of the weather condition known as a temperature inversion, where cold air lies close to the sea with warmer air above it,” David Braine, a BBC meteorologist, told the Guardian previously.
“Since cold air is denser than warm air, it bends light towards the eyes of someone standing on the ground or on the coast, changing how a distant object appears.”
So how does that translate into seeing flying ships? Well, during a Fata Morgana light will leave the distant object, in this case a ship, and that light passes through several different layers of air of different temperatures.
But, instead of traveling in a straight line, like our brains always presume, the light curves downwards towards Earth. Because our brains can’t compute this, they place the ship somewhere it actually isn’t.
This could be somewhere higher than it actually is, making it appear stretched, upside down or duplicated.
Braine added: “Superior mirages can produce a few different types of images – here a distant ship appears to float high above its actual position, but sometimes an object below the horizon can become visible.”
Photographers have captured floating ships
On a number of occasions across the world, photographers have managed to capture the phenomenon that is a Fata Morgana, and one person has shared their images on the Reddit thread r/confusing_perspective.
“On some cold winter mornings in flatland northeastern Colorado, you can see Fata Morgana images of a few of the small towns that are over the horizon, hidden most of the time by the curvature of the Earth,” one user commented.
“Some are stretched vertically, as if there are skyscrapers there (there aren’t), sometimes there are inverted images over right-side-up ones, it’s pretty cool to see.”
Another joked: “Flat earthers’ heads just exploded seeing this,” while a third said: “Simulation glitch, outside loading distance.”
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