AN INCREDIBLE optical illusion showed a cruise ship flying over the ocean.
Images taken from the beach at Mount Maunganui in New Zealand show the vessel apparently hovering over the horizon.
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The ship appears to float on the ocean Credit: ViralHog
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The illusion causes light to bend off the plateCredit: ViralHog
The sighting, filmed by bather Monika Shaffner, is caused by a natural phenomenon, a mirage, which occurs when a layer of warm air settles on top of a layer of cold air.
When a mirage occurs, changes in the atmosphere change the way the human eye sees a distant object.
Mirages occur especially in the desert or at sea and cause the image of an object to appear to be shifted up, down or to one side from its true position.
Normally, light waves from the sun travel directly through the atmosphere to our eyes, but light travels at different speeds through warm and cold air.
Mirages occur when the ground is very hot and the air is cold, Planet Science reports.
The warm ground heats the layer of air just above the ground, and when light moves through the cold air into the warm air layer, it is refracted (bent).
A layer of very warm air near the ground refracts light from the sky in almost a U-shaped curve.
Since our brain doesn’t see the image as distorted light, it thinks it must be coming from something on the ground.
In the case of a New Zealand cruise ship, mirage causes the ship’s light to bend as it passes through gaps in the air.
An optical illusion can also be seen where the sun sets over the ocean, when the spherical sun appears to stretch or distort as it “meets” the horizon.
Earlier this year, a photographer captured several images in Qatar that appeared to show gigantic devil horns rising above the Persian Gulf.
Elias Chasiotis captured a solar eclipse combined with the effects of a light-bending mirage seen near the ocean’s surface.
He said: “I expected optical effects like a nether mirage to be visible and was lucky enough to catch them.”
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The photo seems to show that the ocean has devil horns Credit: Elias Chasiotis
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Categories: Optical Illusion
Source: newstars.edu.vn