Pilot's Glory Decoding: the aura of common pilots

A very interesting natural phenomenon that you may have missed.

If you've ever been on a plane and used to look out the window to see the surroundings, you may have seen a scene of a halo enveloping the image of the shadow of an airplane you're sitting on reflecting. up the clouds. Maybe you consider it a good omen, signaling your flight will have many advantages, or you consider it a mystery that gives off an extremely powerful magic that makes you unable to take your eyes off. But today, scientists have proven that what you see is not really a supernatural phenomenon at all.

"Pilot's Glory"- the aura of pilots.(photo: Remco Douma / Getty Images).

According to HowStuffWorks, this aura is an optical phenomenon that has been discovered by climbers since the day the plane is still a human dream. It is not created by the shadow of an airplane, but they often appear in the same place and at the same time.

According to a scientific article published on Scientific American in 2012 by Brazilian physicist H.Moyses Nusenzveig, for the first time, it was discovered that this aura was around the mid-eighteenth century. Members of the French scientific expedition team climbed to the top of Pambamarca, a mountain in Ecuador, and they described that they had seen the sun emerge from behind a cloud and illuminated them, creating a The light like the holy rings are on their heads.

A halo image shines around the shadow of a man at Glen Canyon Dam, Arizona.(photo: Jeff Topping / Getty Images).

It was not until the early years of the twentieth century that German physicist Gustav Mie could come up with a mathematical formula to explain why water droplets hovering in the air can cause scattering. bright . The article in the meteorological journal of the American Meteorological Association showed that this aura is produced by the scattering of back light, the result of the process of light reflected through a certain angle by tiny droplets in the air (tears that cannot be seen).

The size of the corona ring depends on many factors such as the wavelength of light, the average diameter of the droplets and their distribution. In order to be able to see this aura, the viewer must stand directly between the light source and the water droplets, and that is why these auras often surround the shadows created by the light source. .

The usual aura appears around the shadows of the planes.(photo: Adam Jones / Getty Images).

But Gustav Mie's mathematical formula has not really explained the way aura works. In the 80s of the twentieth century, Nussenzveig and a NASA doctor, Warren Wiscombe, discovered that most of the light that creates aura does not really go through droplets. Nature also explained that the main cause of corona formation is a process called " wave tunneling" , in which sunlight passes through water droplets with sufficient distance. to create electromagnetic waves in them. These waves then bounce around inside the water droplets, escape and emit rays that create the halo that we see today.

This phenomenon may interest you, but with seasoned pilots, aura is a warning that cloud layers are containing a large amount of moist air , and if passing through those clouds create thin ice on the surface of the aircraft.