I just got back from this evening’s Cafe Scientifique — where were you guys? — and I got to see lots of pretty pictures of halos and sundogs and light pillars. One of the nice things about living in Morris is that we actually get a lot of that weird atmospheric phenomena here, because we have lots of the raw material for them here: ice crystals. Vast drifting clouds of hexagonal crystals, flat and columnar, of various proportions, floating in the sky at various orientations to both refract and reflect light into our eyes.
I won’t go into all the details, since you weren’t there. And since most of you live in a less blessed place than the cold crisp upper midwest in the wintertime, you won’t get to see them, because your wicked heat melts all those sharp edged crystals into sludgy droopy droplets. Sorry. But I wanted to pass along one tip.
There’s some free software called Halosim that lets you do simulations of ice crystal distributions in the atmosphere. You specify their sizes and proportions and shapes, and then it traces the paths of light rays and produces an idealized image of what you should be able to see.
It’s very cool. You can tinker and see that to make dramatic sundogs, for instance, you need lots of flat hexagonal platelets floating in a mostly horizontal orientation, and presto, you’ll get a pair of virtual suns 22° to either side of the real one.
Well, maybe you can do that. It’s PC only, so I can’t run any of the simulations on my home computers myself. I’ll have to settle for looking at the real thing, darn it.
A bit of humor: http://ravenconjure.blogspot.com/2013/02/sending-hell-hounds-against-gossipers.html
Well, that’s very cool. I’ll pass this along to an astronomy-lover I know.
I have seen a few haloes and sundogs myself but not often.
Weren’t these one suggested cause of the supposed Miracle of the Sun in Fatima?
Other than the usual misquoted, made up, exaggerated claims a friend of a friend of your great uncle who talked to someone who might have been there but it’s really true, no really, honest cause of course.
It’s god, quick… worship it.
there were some nice haloes… last Tuesday? Yes, i think it was Tuesday. first time I saw them
Sniny. TIme to fire up Wine.
Creating parhelia (sundogs) is cool – blowing them away by launching a rocket through them and using its sonic boom is even cooler -see :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsDEfu8s1Lw
Via the bad astronomy blog here :
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/02/17/rocket-launch-blows-away-the-sky/
originally.
Whoa.
NASA has more on that event here :
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sdo/news/sundog-mystery.html
You can get VMWare Fusion or Parallels, and they run Windows inside your Mac. Ever heard of the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment? This is the computer version.
I ran HaloSim just fine using WinXP inside of VMWare. I found the view positioning rather tricky, and the results are dots rather than smooth shapes — I couldn”t figure out how to make the dots weak enough so as to get smoothness when I make a large number of them.
@10
Probably don’t even need that. WINE is available for Mac.
Who is this OperaArches? I see him spamming that same link all over FtB.
@Azuma Hazuki #14
Worryingly Mabus-esque, isn’t it?
It’s DM again? :( Eesh, maybe it’s time for the Mounties to get another call…
In addition to Ipetrich’s suggestion to run Windows in a virtual machine:
If you don’t have a Windows licence, you can use a free OS and use the API emulation layer WINE to run the program. It works fine for me here (Ubuntu 12.04).
Someone wrote that WINE is available for OS X, too. That would be even easier but I cannot comment on that, having no experience with any of the world’s most ruthless patent troll’s products.
Yes, one can get WINE for OSX. The simplest way to do so is to get Crossover for Mac, some software with WINE built into it.
There are several VM packages that allow you to run “PC” software on your non-Windows computer. My son likes Parallels for the Mac. Most, though, require that you have a licensed Windows OS installed.