Blue Ray of Sunrise over Mont Blanc

Physics

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

LOOKING out at 5 o'clock this morning from a balcony of this hotel, 1545 metres above sea-level, and about 68 kilometres W. 18° S. from Mont Blanc, I had a magnificent view of Alpine ranges of Switzerland, Savoy, and Dauphiné perfectly clear and sharp on the morning twilight sky. This promised me an opportunity for which I had been waiting five or six years; to see the earliest instantaneous light through very clear air, and find whether it was perceptibly blue. I therefore resolved to watch an hour till sunrise, and was amply rewarded by all the splendours I saw. Having only vague knowledge of the orientation of the hotel, I could not at first judge whereabouts the sun would rise; but in the course of half an hour rosy tints on each side of the place of strongest twilight showed me that it would be visible from the balcony; and I was helped to this conclusion by Haidinger's brushes when the illumination of the air at greater altitudes by a brilliant half-moon nearly over head, was overpowered by sunlight streaming upwards from beyond the mountains. A little later, beams of sunlight and shadows of distant mountains converged clearly to a point deep under the very summit of Mont Blanc. In the course of five or ten minutes I was able to watch the point of convergence travelling obliquely upwards till in an instant I saw a blue light against the sky on the southern profile of Mont Blanc; which, in less than the onetwentieth of a second became dazzlingly white, like a brilliant electric arc-light. I had no dark glass at hand, so I could not any longer watch the rising sun.

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