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A sunbeam, in meteorological optics, is a beam of sunlight that appears to radiate from the position of the Sun. Shining through openings in clouds or between other objects such as mountains and buildings, these beams of particle-scattered sunlight are essentially parallel shafts separated by darker shadowed volumes.
Crepuscular rays, sometimes colloquially referred to as god rays, are sunbeams that originate when the Sun appears to be just above or below a layer of clouds, during the twilight period. [1] Crepuscular rays are noticeable when the contrast between light and dark is most obvious. Crepuscular comes from the Latin word crepusculum, meaning ...
Therefore, the sunbeam hitting the ground at a 30° angle spreads the same amount of light over twice as much area (if we imagine the Sun shining from the south at noon, the north–south width doubles; the east–west width does not). Consequently, the amount of light falling on each square mile is only half as much.
The sun moves across the sky with clear circular polarization patterns surrounding it. When the Sun is located at the zenith the polarization is independent of azimuth and decreases with rising altitude (as it approaches the sun). The pattern then continues as the sun approaches the horizon once again for sunset.
The solar zenith angle is the zenith angle of the sun, i.e., the angle between the sun’s rays and the vertical direction.It is the complement to the solar altitude or solar elevation, which is the altitude angle or elevation angle between the sun’s rays and a horizontal plane.
The light from stars (other than the Sun) arrives at Earth precisely collimated, because stars are so far away they present no detectable angular size.However, due to refraction and turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere, starlight arrives slightly uncollimated at the ground with an apparent angular diameter of about 0.4 arcseconds.
The days are short and the nights are long. That can only mean one thing: The winter solstice is coming. The first day of winter for the northern hemisphere of Earth will begin on Dec. 21 at ...
The geometric effect is identical to crepuscular rays, where parallel sunbeams appear to diverge. A meteor that does not point back to the known radiant for a given shower is known as a sporadic and is not considered part of that shower. Shower meteors may appear a short time before the radiant has risen in the observer's eastern sky.