Have you ever watched the sun set over the sea horizon? Of course, yes. Did you wait for the moment when the upper edge of the solar disk touched the okoy and then disappeared? For sure. But maybe you noticed (if the sky was cloudless and absolutely transparent) an amazing phenomenon that occurs at the moment when the luminous Helios casts its last ray? If not, then do not miss the opportunity to make such an observation - and then a ray of amazing green color will hit your eyes. You will not find this unique shade either in the palette of nature itself or on the canvases of painters.
Jules Verne has a novel called Green Ray, whose heroine is chasing this rare phenomenon throughout the Hebrides archipelago, but, alas, in vain …
The green beam is an optical effect that can last from one second to five minutes and is manifested by a flash of green and sometimes blue. As we have already said, it appears at the moment when the solar disk disappears behind the horizon (usually sea).
You can observe the green ray under three conditions: an open horizon (at sea in the absence of waves or in the steppe), clean air and cloudlessness.
The usual duration of this phenomenon is several seconds, but this time can be increased if, when the effect appears, you quickly run up to a hill (in the steppe) or move from deck to deck of the ship so quickly that the position of the eyes relative to the beam is maintained. American pilot and explorer Richard Byrd managed to observe the green beam for 35 minutes. This happened during an expedition to the South Pole at the end of the polar night: then the edge of the first appeared solar disk moved along the horizon.
Anyone who has seen the green beam is delighted with its unusual emerald tone. Perhaps this extraordinary, simply fantastic purity of the green tone prompted the scientist, a great specialist in holography and all kinds of lasers, William Cohn, to an interesting idea. He began to look for an explanation for this natural phenomenon in the radiation of excited atoms, say, oxygen during their transition to a normal state from a metastable one, due to which radiation with a wavelength of 0.5585 microns appears. Nevertheless, the second is not completely clear, namely: how such a natural laser appears.
Daniil Myslinsky
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