Tresco Common SunCamera

The transition between the erect and the inverted images in inferior mirages is continuous; there is no sharp demarcation between the two images. At the line where the image seems to "fold over" and invert, there is a great vertical magnification of the image; random landscape features appear stretched vertically, sometimes looking like the raised pile on a carpet. This continuous transition was first observed by William Hyde Wollaston on August 22nd 1800 in a paper read to the Royal Society two years later he wrote; "I was sitting on a boat near Chelsea in such a position that my eye was elevated about half a yard from the surface of the water, and had a view over its surface, that probably somewhat exceeded a mile in length, when I remarked that the oars of several barges at a distance, that were then coming up with the tide , appeared bent in various degrees , according to their distance from me.The most distant appeared nearly in the form here represented; DID being my visable horizon by apparent curvature of the water; AB the oar.