Talk:Heiligenschein

Definition

Are you sure that this is the correct definition of heiligenschein? The German word translates to halo (both the thing around a saints head, and also an optical phenomenon). Also, the photo looks very much like a glory. The German page de:Glorie shows a very similar photo, too. 82.32.65.149 19:56, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

Heiligenschein is certainly a German word, however it has established itself in the English language--at least amongst the terminology of weather and meteorolog. Cellini's Halo is sometimes used, as well, but I wouldn't say it is used more than Heiligenschein: I would certainly vote to leave it in Wikiped.

Lastly, I disagree, the Wikiped. photo does not look like a glory. Glories are diffractive and involve rings of colors--having been created in a manner similar to rainbows (though a bit more complicated): This is clearly missing in the photo. See this same website and discussions on 'glories' and on 'Brocken Spectres':

http://www.sundog.clara.co.uk/droplets/glory.htm

http://www.sundog.clara.co.uk/droplets/globrock.htm

--unsigned by 198.182.55.28 at 07:07, 26 August 2006

As uploader of the picture for this article, I can confirm that this is a photo of the Heiligenschein and is not a photo of a glory (as previously explained). This article should NOT be deleted and replaced by Glory (optical phenomenon) as the two are distinct phenomena caused by different mechanisms.

The word "Heiligenschein" is from the German for "Holy light" (referring to the retroreflected light visible around the shadow of the observer giving a halo appearance). A reference for this can be found in the excellent book "Light and Colour in the Outdoors" (Minnaert, M.J.) - I will add references as soon as I can get the correct page numbers. The word has been adopted as a term describing the phenomenon - just because it is German doesn't preclude its use - look at Bremsstrahlung for another German word used to describe a physical process...

--Coatesg 11:52, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

Merge with Sylvanshine

Someone has suggested merging this article with sylvanshine, which is something quite different. Instead this article should be deleted (it is a German word, not an English one) and redirected to Glory (optical phenomenon). As should the stubs at anthelia and anthelion. --Shantavira 15:36, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

There is indeed a relationship between Sylvanshine and Heiligenschein. They both involve spherical water droplets sitting just above the surface of a leaf (or blade of grass, etc...) and which collect light to a crude focus. Some of the light then travels directly back towards the antisolar point, creating this 'shine/schein'. A mention or link between the two is in order, yes definately!

And excellent online resource for this effect is:

http://www.sundog.clara.co.uk/droplets/heilig.htm

--unsigned by 198.182.55.28 at 07:07, 26 August 2006

In terms of linking this to sylvanshine - yes they should be linked - in fact I would say that the two are exactly the same effec - just that Sylvanshine refers explicitly to retroreflection from waxy leaf trees rather than a general reflection in the case of the heiligenschein.

--Coatesg 11:52, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

Agree, heiligenschein and sylvanshine should have individual articles (by now they are linked to each other). The merge templates have been there for six months now, maybe its time to remove them?

/ Mats Halldin (talk) 07:26, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Translation

The translation of "Heiligenschein" that is in parentehesed is definitely "halo". The book you quote is wrong. "Holy light" would mean "heiliger Schein" which is grammaticaly different. "Heiligenschein" has a differnt meaning. (I'm German so you can really trust me on this.) --unsigned by 129.143.9.84 (talk) at 19:35, 14 October 2006

Oh! Sorry, I edited the article first and read this afterwards. Feel free to revert my edit of the translation. BTW, there is a German article on de:Heiligenschein which is linked to aureole.

/ Mats Halldin (talk) 07:11, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

I'd say that the literal translation of "Heiligenschein" is saint's light, but aureole is correct by meaning -- Diogenes von Wien (talk) 18:49, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

I've deleted the pseudo-translation "holy/saintly appearance". In the first place, Heiligenschein is the standard German word for 'halo' as any dictionary will confirm (e.g. http://www.dict.cc/?s=Heiligenschein), and breaking it down into its constituent parts is not helpful here. But secondly, if you really do want to take this German compound noun apart und understand how it is built, you have to do it right. The first element is a noun, Heiligen, the plural of Heiliger meaning 'saint'. Of course, it in turn derives from the adjective heilig, 'holy', but it is the noun we see here. The second element, Schein is exactly equivalent to the English noun shine, meaning the glow of some kind of light. It is true that in some contexts the root -schein- can mean 'seem' or 'appear' (Scheinasylant etc), but here it clearly refers to the shining of light, as in Sonnenschein (sunshine). So if you really do want to do a rather patronising baby-translation to give the impression that German doesn't use real words, you would translate it as "Saints' shine". But let's just not. So I'm deleting that from the article. --Doric Loon (talk) 17:48, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

If anyone is really interested, I should add that Heiligen could also be genitive singular, so it might only imply one saint. Rather more relevant here, you might check out Gegenschein, which is constructed in much the same way. --Doric Loon (talk) 17:54, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

Explanation

reduction in the proportion of shadows viewed at angles close to the backscatter direction — I find this quite uncomprehensible. Can't someone provide a more legible explanation? Maybe using two sentences? --BjKa (talk) 09:33, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

Merge with Opposition effect?

The page on Opposition effect uses the exact same photograph of the lunar landing, and attributes the bright spot to "opposition effect". It makes no mention of the Heiligenschein phenomenon. Either one of the captions is wrong, or the Heiligenschein is caused by opposition surge. If that is true, then it ought to say something about it in both articles, or they should simply be merged..45Colt 16:59, 17 October 2015 (UTC)

It seemed to be the case that Heiligenschein is about the dewdrop mechanism and Opposition surge is about the astronomically-relevant mechanisms. That seems pretty reasonable to me, and I edited both articles to make that clearer. --Steve (talk) 17:21, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Is Dew Required?

When flying hang gliders or other ultralight aircraft with a good view straight to the ground, one always sees this bright halo around their shadow on the ground even in mid afternoon when there is absolutely no dew on the ground. It can even be seen at high altitude when the shadow of the aircraft is too small to clearly see. I have always considered it to be the same mechanism as a glory, but with no cloud or fog droplets to create rainbows colors. I'm inclined to think that "heiligenschein" and "opposition surge" are exactly the same phenomenon and this "dew drop effect" is simply not correct or not important.

The effect is stronger when dew is present, but dew is not required. I have added a citation needed tag to the explanation given in the article, because the one source that we have for this article describes a different process. It is not quite retroreflection. NHammen (talk) 14:55, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

I fixed the problem that I had, but not the one that you had. Personally, I would say that heiligenschein is a type of opposition surge. But that would be original research, because every scientific paper I see about opposition surge only mentions shadow hiding and coherent backscatter. NHammen (talk) 17:00, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Annoying confusion in this article

"Hotspot" corresponds to any albedo variation in aerial or dawn/dusk photographies in the antisolar direction. Several physical phenomena can cause this. The most known in photogrammetry corresponds to the opposition effect: correlation between visibility from light source and observer, that can occur in photos of forests, fields, but even sand, gravel, rocks (indeed, any pattern casting shadows). Water droplets having a strong backscatter in their BRDF, they can also cause a hotspot as emerging effect on fields, which is the case mentioned in this page. But the explanation wrongly assumes that all hotspots are these. → maybe we would need a "hotspot" page, pointing to the different effects, + to rewrite the paragraph here to avoid the confusion. Fabrice.Neyret (talk) 14:50, 21 August 2023 (UTC)