The Brockenspectre

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Since 2004, the Brocken Challenge, an ultra marathon 84-kilometre-long (52mi) from Göttingen to the Brocken summit, has been staged in February each year.

The viviparous lizard occurs on the Brocken in a unique, dark-colored variant, Lacerta vivipara aberr.The apparent magnification of size of the shadow is an optical illusion that occurs when the shadow on relatively nearby clouds is judged by the observer to be at the same distance as faraway land objects seen through gaps in the clouds. miles uphill, has taken place since the 1920s) and the Brocken Marathon which is part of the Harz Mountain Run with its start and finish south of Wernigerode.

Other early documented names of the Brocken were, in 1401, the Brockenberg, in 1424 the Brocberg, in 1495 mons ruptus (Latin), in 1511 the Brogken and Brockin, in 1531 the Brogken, in 1540 the Brokenberg and, in 1589, the Brackenberg. Occurrence [ edit ] A semi-artificial Brocken spectre created by standing in front of the headlight of a car, on a foggy night. The term has been popularly used throughout literature, mentioned in works by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll amongst others. The apparent magnification of size of the shadow is an optical illusion that occurs when the observer judges their shadow on relatively nearby clouds to be at the same distance as faraway land objects seen through gaps in the clouds, or when there are no reference points by which to judge its size. Its Low German name, broken, as the mountain had become named in 1176 in the Saxon World Chronicle and also in English, means "broken".A theory by Brazilian physicist Herch Moysés Nussenzveig suggests that the light energy beamed back by a glory originates mostly from classical wave tunneling (synonymous in the paper to the evanescent wave coupling), which is an interaction between an evanescent light wave traveling along the surface of the drop and the waves inside the drop. Water in the air acts as tiny prisms so when light enters the raindrop, it reflects off the sides of the drop and is broken into a spectrum. Slothrop and Geli Tripping experience the famous Brocken Spectre in Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow, as the Mittelbau-Dora labour camp in the Harz mountains north of Nordhausen from 1943 was the home of the V-2 rocket production.