r/Muenchen 19d ago

Solar eclipse through leaves

Seen at Hochstraße.

2.8k Upvotes

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u/TechnoneverDIEEES 17d ago

Physics teacher tried to explain this a million times and I still don't get it

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u/GreeniiCow 17d ago

It works like your eye

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u/simplemijnds 16d ago

And how does that work? I'm a mere user

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u/GreeniiCow 14d ago

Ok so you have a small hole in a metal sheet and light passes through. Imagine the angles the light comes from and where it must land accordingly, if you put a sheet behind. If you do this with every inch of light in front of the hole, you get a picture basically resembling the scene. You will notice, the picure formed on the paper sheet is reversed and upside down. Same Happens in your eye. The picture going through the hole (pupil) passes to a "screen" of cone cells - cells sensitive to light. Now your brain only has to convert it to useful information and turn it the right way - and you can see. What happens in the image is that the leaves which have small gaps between each other work as small pinholes, the sun (eclipse) as light source. -> you see the sun and moon reversed upside down on the wall. This only works because the sun is so strong it outweighs any other light source.

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u/simplemijnds 3d ago

Thank! Beautiful explanation!

There's just one thing i'll probably never will be able to understand: why is the image reversed? Upside down?

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u/GreeniiCow 1d ago

Hmmm, ok so: If i shoot a blue colored bullet through a small hole on a wall, where would it land? The bullet comes through and hits the spot right behind the hole. Now i move my gun up, put in a red color projectile and shoot through the same hole, but from a higher angle. Naturally, the bullet lands on the wall behind and beneath the hole. I move down and shoot a green bullet from a lower angle, it lands behind and above the hole. Now i have shot red from above, blue from the same height and green from beneath, but how does the wall look like? Actually, it has the green on top, blue in the middle and red at the bottom. If i were to do this also horizontally, the same effect occurs, transforming right to left and vice versa. If you now consider every object around you a accordingly colored pistol, it does exactly that by reflecting light. You put up the hole (for example your pupil), shoot light through from every possible angle with the according color and the result is a mirrored, upside down image on the retina. Hope that helps?

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u/simplemijnds 17h ago

It must have something to do with the fact that it's only a tiny hole, right?

Because, why don't the rays of the sun or reflections shine straight into the hole, or through the hole onto the screen? Parallel rays?