A RetroSearch Logo

Home - News ( United States | United Kingdom | Italy | Germany ) - Football scores

Search Query:

Showing content from http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/phyopt/corfog.html below:

Corona from Fogged Eyeglasses

Corona from Fogged Eyeglasses: Estimation of Droplet Size

From an image of aperture diffraction formed by fog droplets on cold eyeglasses, an estimate of droplet size can be made. The colored fringes are presumed to be droplet diffraction like that sometimes seen as a corona around the moon. The glasses were positioned at 3.66 m (12 ft) and the horizontal span of the lights was 0.6 m (2 ft). The span of the lights then represents an angle of 9.5°. Scaling the image gave an angle of 3.7° out to the red fringe.

For a first estimate, assume a wavelength of about 600 nm for the red fringe and assume that the red fringe represents the first subsidiary maximum of the aperture diffraction. Using the aperture calculation with 3.7° as the first maximum gives a circular aperture diameter of about 15 microns. If that represents the diameter of the fog droplets, then that is a measure of 15 microns for the droplet size.

There are many reasons for caution about claiming that the above estimate represents a real measurement of droplet size. One of them is illustrated in the two images above. Two images taken within seconds of each other and very close together spatially show different diffraction patterns. The one on the left has a red fringe about half as far out as that one used in the estimate above, which would give droplet size 30 microns. While that may be reasonable, one cannot be sure that it is the first subsidiary maximum which is giving the color to the fringe. If the red fringe in the first estimate above were the second subsidiary maximum, then the estimated size would be 25 microns and if it were the third, the estimate would be 34 microns.

A further reason for caution about claims for particle size is that the diffraction is occuring around a droplet which is itself partially transparent. The diffraction pattern is not in fact the same as that expected from a circular opaque barrier. Experiences with estimating the diameter of human hairs by measuring the diffraction from them has led to caution about claiming to have measured size from the diffraction.

A similar phenomenon, also attributed to aperture diffraction from small particles, is the set of colored fringes one can sometimes see around a bright light source like a lightbulb. This corona effect is attributed to small particles on the surface of your eye. My personal observation of this effect is usually early in the morning. The act of blinking changes the intensity of the fringes and they disappear after a few minutes of blinking, suggesting that they are surface phenomena. One particularly prominent set of colored fringes was measured by locating the center of the prominent red ring at about 15 cm from the center of the light I was looking at. The distance to the light was 2.44 meters. The red color seemed to be of a similar hue to a helium-neon laser, so a wavelength of 630 nm was estimated. Assuming that the prominent red ring was the first subsidiary maximum of the aperture diffraction gives a calculated aperture size of 16 micrometers. This estimate is certainly subject to the uncertainties described above in regard to the fog droplets.

Meyer-Arendt in Section 3.5 of Introductory Classical and Modern Optics, 3rd Ed. reports his personal measurement and arrives at a particle diameter of 12.4 micrometers. He suggests that it might be the epithelium cells of the cornea that cause the effect.


RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue

Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo

HTML: 3.2 | Encoding: UTF-8 | Version: 0.7.4