14 Dec 2008
A good walk in misty condition following the Mourne Wall from Hares gap Approximately 14 Km.
From about 500 meters up the ground was frozen and nearing Comedagh we topped out over the cloud in the valley.
As conditions were right I had a look over the Mourne wall into the Pot of Legawherry which was filled with mist and right enough an optical phenomen know as a Brocken Spectre was visible, but faint. I managed to get a photo of it (click on photo below for a better view). The following is an extract from Wikimedia
A Brocken Spectre, also called Brocken bow or mountain spectre is the apparently enormously magnified shadow of an observer, cast upon the upper surfaces of clouds opposite the sun. The phenomenon can appear on a misty mountainside or cloud bank, or even from an aeroplane, but the frequent fogs and low-altitude accessibility of the Brocken, a peak in the Hartz mountains in Germany, have created a local legend from which the phenomenon draws its name. The "spectre" appears when the sun shines from behind a climber who is looking down from a ridge or peak into mist. The light projects the climber's shadow forward through the mist, often in an odd triangular shape due to perspective. The apparent magnification of size of the shadow is an optical illusion that occurs when the observer judges his shadow on relatively nearby clouds to be at the same distance as faraway land objects seen through gaps in the clouds, or when there are no reference points at all by which to judge its size. The shadow also falls on water droplets of varying distances from the eye, confusing depth perception. The ghost can appear to move (sometimes quite suddenly) because of the movement of the cloud layer.The head of the figure is often surrounded by the glowing halo - like rings of a glory, rings of coloured light that appear directly opposite the sun when sunlight is reflected by a cloud of uniformly-sized water droplets.
A good walk in misty condition following the Mourne Wall from Hares gap Approximately 14 Km.
From about 500 meters up the ground was frozen and nearing Comedagh we topped out over the cloud in the valley.
As conditions were right I had a look over the Mourne wall into the Pot of Legawherry which was filled with mist and right enough an optical phenomen know as a Brocken Spectre was visible, but faint. I managed to get a photo of it (click on photo below for a better view). The following is an extract from Wikimedia
At the top of Comedagh we managed to squeeze into the summit shelter to get our lunch before heading down to the Mourne Col and back by the Brandy Pad
