Mount Broken (Broken mountain) - the highest point of the Harz, 1141.1 meters high, located in the state of Saxony-Anhalt. According to legend, on the night of April 30 to May 1, Walpurgis Night, witches arrange a Sabbath on the top of this mountain. References to this can be found not only in local legends, but also in Goethe's tragedy "Faust". They say that in the depths of the mountain there is a cave, where the witches hide from prying eyes …
One way or another, but the place itself is truly unusual and famous for a rare natural phenomenon called the "Broken Ghost". A person standing on a hill, behind whose back the sun is setting, can observe that his shadow, falling on clouds or fog, looks slightly enlarged and with a rainbow halo around his head.
The frequent fogs of Brocken and its low-altitude accessibility back in the Middle Ages gave rise to the legend of the ghost of the mountain. Ignorant people saw in this an angelic presence or mysticism, but in this case it is only an optical illusion. Light projects a shadow through fog, often in an odd triangular shape due to perspective. Shadow resizing is an optical illusion that occurs when an observer judges that his shadow on relatively neighboring clouds will be at the same distance as distant earth objects seen through gaps in the clouds, or when there are no control points at all to determine its size …
The shadow also falls on water droplets of variable distances from the eye, confusing depth perception. Sometimes it seems that the "ghost" is moving. This is due to the movement of the cloud layer and sometimes happens quite suddenly. In most cases, the head of the figure is surrounded by iridescent rings that appear directly opposite the sun when light is reflected by a cloud of uniform water droplets.
If you visited Germany and did not visit the mysterious mountain Brocken, then you probably lost a lot …
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