Fata Morgana (mirage)
A is a complex form of mirage visible in a narrow band right above the horizon. The term Fata Morgana is the Italian translation of "Morgan the Fairy". These mirages are often seen in the Italian Strait of Messina, and were described as fairy castles in the air or false land conjured by her magic.
Fata Morgana mirages significantly distort the object or objects on which they are based, often such that the object is completely unrecognizable. A Fata Morgana may be seen at sea or on land, in polar regions, or in deserts. It may involve almost any kind of distant object, including boats, islands, and the coastline. Often, a Fata Morgana changes rapidly. The mirage comprises several inverted and upright images stacked on top of one another. Fata Morgana mirages also show alternating compressed and stretched zones.
The optical phenomenon occurs because rays of light bend when they pass through air layers of different temperatures in a steep thermal inversion where an atmospheric duct has formed. In calm weather, a layer of significantly warmer air may rest over colder dense air, forming an atmospheric duct that acts like a refracting lens, producing a series of both inverted and erect images. A Fata Morgana requires a duct to be present; thermal inversion alone is not enough to produce this kind of mirage. While a thermal inversion often takes place without there being an atmospheric duct, an atmospheric duct cannot exist without there first being a thermal inversion.
Observing a Fata Morgana
A Fata Morgana is most commonly seen in polar regions, where it may be known as an iceblink, especially over large sheets of ice that have a uniform low temperature. It may, however, be observed in almost any area. In polar regions the Fata Morgana phenomenon is observed on relatively cold days. In deserts, over oceans, and over lakes, a Fata Morgana may be observed on hot days.To generate the Fata Morgana phenomenon, the thermal inversion has to be strong enough that the curvature of the light rays within the inversion layer is stronger than the curvature of the Earth. Under these conditions, the rays bend and create arcs. An observer needs to be within or below an atmospheric duct in order to be able to see a Fata Morgana. Fata Morgana may be observed from any altitude within the Earth's atmosphere, from sea level up to mountaintops, and even including the view from airplanes.
A Fata Morgana may be described as a very complex superior mirage with more than three distorted erect and inverted images. Because of the constantly changing conditions of the atmosphere, a Fata Morgana may change in various ways within just a few seconds of time, including changing to become a straightforward superior mirage. The sequential image here shows sixteen photographic frames of a mirage of the Farallon Islands as seen from San Francisco; the images were all taken on the same day. In the first fourteen frames, elements of the Fata Morgana mirage display alternations of compressed and stretched zones. The last two frames were photographed a few hours later, around sunset time. At that point in time, the air was cooler while the ocean was probably a little bit warmer, which caused the thermal inversion to be not as extreme as it was few hours before. A mirage was still present at that point, but it was not so complex as a few hours before sunset: the mirage was no longer a Fata Morgana, but instead had become a simple superior mirage.
Fata Morgana mirages are visible to the naked eye, but in order to be able to see the detail within them, it is best to view them through binoculars, a telescope, or as is the case in the images here, through a telephoto lens. Gabriel Gruber and , who observed Fata Morgana above Lake Cerknica, were the first to study it in a laboratory setting.
Etymology
La Fata Morgana is the Italian name of Morgan le Fay, also known as Morgana and other variants, who was described as a powerful sorceress in Arthurian legend. As her name indicates, the figure of Morgan appears to have been originally a fairy figure rather than a human woman. The early works featuring Morgan do not elaborate on her nature, other than describing her role as that of a fairy or magician. Later, she was described as King Arthur's half-sister and an enchantress. After King Arthur's final battle at Camlann, Morgan takes her half-brother Arthur to Avalon. In medieval times, suggestions for the location of Avalon included the other side of the Earth at the antipodes, Sicily, and other locations in the Mediterranean. Legends claimed that sirens in the waters around Sicily lured the unwary to their death. Morgan is associated not only with Sicily's Mount Etna, but also with sirens. In a medieval French Arthurian romance of the 13th century, Floriant et Florete, she is called "mistress of the fairies of the salt sea". Ever since that time, Fata Morgana has been associated with Sicily in the Italian folklore and literature. For example, a local legend connects Morgan and her magical mirages with Roger I of Sicily and the Norman conquest of the island from the Arabs.Walter Charleton, in his 1654 treatise italic=no, devotes several pages to the description of the Morgana of Rhegium, in the Strait of Messina. He records that a similar phenomenon was reported in Africa by Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian writing in the first century BC, and that the Rhegium Fata Morgana was described by Damascius, a Greek philosopher of the sixth century AD. In addition, Charleton tells us that Athanasius Kircher described the Rhegium mirage in his book of travels.
An early mention of the term Fata Morgana in English, in 1818, referred to such a mirage noticed in the Strait of Messina, between Calabria and Sicily.
Famous legends and observations
The ''Flying Dutchman''
The Flying Dutchman, according to folklore, is a ghost ship that can never go home, and is doomed to sail the seven seas forever. The Flying Dutchman is usually spotted from afar, sometimes seen to be glowing with ghostly light. One of the possible explanations of the origin of the Flying Dutchman legend is a Fata Morgana mirage seen at sea.A Fata Morgana superior mirage of a ship can take many different forms. Even when the boat in the mirage does not seem to be suspended in the air, it still looks ghostly, and unusual, and what is even more important, it is ever-changing in its appearance. Sometimes a Fata Morgana causes a ship to appear to float inside the waves, at other times an inverted ship appears to sail above its real companion.
In fact, with a Fata Morgana it can be hard to say which individual segment of the mirage is real and which is not real: when a real ship is out of sight because it is below the horizon line, a Fata Morgana can cause the image of it to be elevated, and then everything which is seen by the observer is a mirage. On the other hand, if the real ship is still above the horizon, the image of it can be duplicated many times and elaborately distorted by a Fata Morgana.
Phantom islands
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Fata Morgana mirages may have played a role in a number of unrelated "discoveries" of arctic and antarctic land masses which were later shown not to exist. Icebergs frozen into the pack ice, or the uneven surface of the ice itself, may have contributed to the illusion of distant land features.Sannikov Land
and Matvei Gedenschtrom claimed to have seen a land mass north of Kotelny Island during their 1809–1810 cartographic expedition to the New Siberian Islands. Sannikov reported this sighting of a "new land" in 1811, and the supposed island was named after him. Three-quarters of a century later, in 1886, Baron Eduard Toll, a Baltic German explorer in Russian service, reported observing Sannikov Land during another expedition to the New Siberian Islands. In 1900, he would lead still another expedition to the region, which had among its objectives the location and exploration of Sannikov Land. The expedition was unsuccessful in this respect. Toll and three others were lost after they departed their ship, which was stuck in ice for the winter, and embarked on a risky expedition by dog sled. In 1937, the Soviet icebreaker Sadko also tried and failed to find Sannikov Land. Some historians and geographers have theorised that the land mass that Sannikov and Toll saw was actually Fata Morganas of Bennett Island.Croker Mountains
In 1818, Sir John Ross led an expedition to discover the long-sought-after Northwest Passage. When he reached Lancaster Sound in Canada, he sighted, in the distance, a land mass with mountains, directly ahead in the ship's course. He named the mountain range the Croker Mountains, after First Secretary to the Admiralty John Wilson Croker, and ordered the ship to turn around and return to England. Several of his officers protested, including First Mate William Edward Parry and Edward Sabine, but they could not dissuade him. The account of Ross's voyage, published a year later, brought to light this disagreement, and the ensuing controversy over the existence of the Croker Mountains ruined Ross's reputation. The year after Ross's expedition, in 1819, Parry was given command of his own Arctic expedition, and proved Ross wrong by continuing west beyond where Ross had turned back, and sailing through the supposed location of the Croker Mountains. The mountain range that had caused Ross to abandon his mission had been a mirage.Ross made two errors. First, he refused to listen to the counsel of his officers, who may have been more familiar with mirages than he was. Second, his attempt to honour Croker by naming a mountain range after him backfired when the mountains turned out to be non-existent. Ross could not obtain ships, or funds, from the government for his subsequent expeditions, and was forced to rely on private backers instead.