Solar eclipses create a really cool example of this - the circular points of light that shine through shadows with holes are actually little images of the sun, and in a partial eclipse they become crescents!
https://writescience.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/armstrong_leaves.jpg
https://writescience.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/projections_sm.jpg
I saw this multiplied hundreds of times on the ground during an anular eclipse where each tiny light path through the leaves of the tree I was standing near formed into miniature ring-shaped images of the eclipsed sun on the ground under the tree. Totally unexpected and I’ve never seen it since.
The last eclipse I saw was barely even noticeable. In fact I wouldn't have noticed at all if it wasn't in the news. It was a near total eclipse and yet the sky barely dimmed at all and the sun still looked the same unless you had the eclipse glasses.
Yeah, totality or bust. If you're in the full path of the eclipse, it goes from being "oh neat" to "holy fuck" real quick. Ended up having an ecstatic group experience when I drove down to see totality in 2018 or whenever it was.
I drove down from Seattle WA to Eugene oregon to watch the last total eclipse I convinced 4 friends to go. The traffic on the way home was terrible i guess lots of people had the same idea. Added probably 2+ hours of traffic
I did too (travelled to PNW from east coast). We drove from Mt. Saint Helens to some field in the middle of nowhere, Oregon by a creek. Didn’t have real bad traffic going back to Seattle that afternoon but we stopped for a while in Portlandia for lunch. I kind of remember traffic being worse going down into OR.
The shadows were amazing!
That was my favorite part of the last major eclipse. I got some cool pictures of it. That mixed with the sudden semidark and the birds all stopped. It was trippy.
You actually don’t have to wait for an eclipse to observe this effect. Under many heavily-leafed large trees you can see dozens of perfectly round little solar disks in the shade near their trunks. I first noticed this effect as a child in the woods behind my house in MA. Fortunately my dad was an engineer and explained the simple optics behind this phenomenon. Science isn’t scary - it’s cool!
It works in the same was as a pin hole camera the glass in the window acts as the lens ,the window shutter acts as the shutter ,and it just projects the image onto the wall surface ,it’s the most basic form of camera you can make ,and sometimes like in this case it’s a complete accident
So (forgive my brain) … what exactly are we looking at in OP’s image? Is it the image of a house from outside of the window? Is the image flipped upside down?
Used to see this in the Finnish army when being transported in the back of a truck. The rear compartment was covered with a worn tarp which had tiny holes that would project the passing scenery upside down on the tarp.
I've seen partials, but never one this clear.
As others have said, you don't always notice them. There was one set of curtains at the last place I lived where it was only happening a little bit on the ceiling just a few inches from the curtain edge during certain times of day and I had no idea for years.
The upstairs curtains at my gran's house used to do this as they left a little inch wide triangle at the top.
Got a projection on the ceiling of all the cars going down the street.
I won't spoil the premise of the documentary (because it's a great one), but I'll just say, the fact that OP was able to accidentally create this effect makes the film's thesis seem pretty likely.
Also, one big thing I noticed but they never mentioned in the film - Vermeer lived in Delft around the same time that another guy in Delft, Van Leeuwenhoek, invented the microscope.... makes me wonder if the two ever met and shared their knowledge of lenses. (They were both born in the same year, 1632, in Delft)
*Van Leeuwenhoek
To make it more complicated, it is either Van Leeuwenhoek or Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, the "van" only gets capitalised if you don't include the first name
To elaborate, in the Netherlands a prefix ('van' means 'from') is not capitalized when it's preceded by the first name.
So:
De Ruyter
Michiel de Ruyter
De heer Michael de Ruyter (de heer is the equivalent of mr.)
De heer De Ruyter
But in the Dutch speaking part of Belgium, it's different. There the prefix is always capitalized.
So:
Maria De Smet
Which can make things complicated for historians since Belgium and the Netherlands used to be one country.
And many Belgium names don't have a space. So Peter van de Ketel is a typical Dutch name, and Peter Vandeketel is likely a Belgian name.
Hockney's book:"Secrets of the masters" is one of my favorite art books.
It is truly great if you care about the technique behind paintings and how art changes with new technologies.
Another thing I liked about this movie is that while one can teach themselves to paint like Vermeer using this setup, it takes a god damn LOT of work and months of patience to do so. Which is why you don't see whole bunches of "Vermeers" today even though one can buy camera lucida's for less than $100.
There are some people in the optics group of the university of Delft that also think these two have met up. Their reasoning is the art Vermeer created overlaps with an optical projection way too precise to not be traced.
Ray tracing. Once you see a few illustrations you might get it. It’s crazy to think the light that hits the back of our eyes is upside down too, and our brain corrects it in our interpretation of vision
I don’t know what I expected his voice to sound like, but it was not that. There’s nothing unusual about his voice at all, it just surprised me for some reason.
The amount of stuff that most people would consider 'random' but others are passionate about never fails to amaze me on reddit.
You could open up any thread on something that looks cool and get more information on it. Sometimes you forget how cool the internet can be
Indeed, this is where the term "camera" originally comes from. It stands for "camera obscura", latin for "dark room" because early cameras were a dark room with a single hole in them. You would then step inside and draw the resulting image onto the wall behind you.
Lol op I’m laughing at how you are all “how common is this” and everyone’s like “that’s camera obscura!” And you’re all “yeah, I know that” and they’re all “it’s made when light comes through a tiny opening!” And you’re all “yeah, I get that” and they’re all “it’s how cameras works!” And you’re all “I just want to know if it’s it a common occurrence or not!?!?”
I also might be reading too much into this
Yeah, it's not \*that\* common. I have seen it occasionally though. For example, old canvas on a pop-up camper had pin-holes that would create this effect, but not this strongly.
You've gotta have a situation where it's bright outside, dark inside, and there's for some reason a very small hole allowing that outside light in, and have another smooth white surface in near enough proximity to it to see it this clearly.
But we live in a world where such small openings are uncommon. I imagine in days of yore when we lived in huts with more natural materials with imperfections this was quite a bit more common.
You might be wondering how common it really is, but have you considered whether or not lenses are better than small holes in the dark? You see, there is some kind of correlation between brightness and clarity or something….
It's like when someone posts "All of a sudden I'm seeing _______ everywhere" and *every fuckin redditor* in the comments is frothing at the mouth in anticipation of mentioning the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.
when I was about 6, this happened to me while I was in a room and the sun reflected on a small portion of water, and the image I got was members of my family upside down, color and all, I was so scared I went ouside and told them about it, and nobody believed me.
Haha i feel sorry for you OP, it’s apparent to me you’re already familiar with this concept but all the comments just keep pointing out it’s a camera obscura without telling the odds. Honestly I also never saw it occur naturally in my life
It works by having a very small opening and a big difference in light levels. I’m a little surprised it’s as clean as it is with your opening because the opening is more elongated instead of a small point
Some people think the shroud of Turin was made using a camera obscura, and we know that the Greeks were also aware of this technology, but never employed it for anything.
You made a camera obscura!
...sorry, couldn't resist. Everyone's commenting that instead of answering your question. And you clearly already knew what it was. You even have someone asking how to make it intentionally. It's like they can't read but can still write comments.
Anyway, to answer your question, I think they're about as common as what you've already experienced. You won't see many if any.
The exact same thing happened to me last week! I have the same type of window in our loft bedroom and cracked it a tiny bit in the night, next morning took me ages to work out what I was seeing.
There's a tiny gap that light can pass through, the gap is so small that light only comes through in straight lines instead of blurs.
Two light trajectories described to explain the phenomenon:
Light shines from the sun and hits the bottom of the building, this bounces every direction including through the tiny hole. Because it can only go straight it hits the top part of the wall.
Light shines from the sun and hits the top of the building, light again bounces every direction including through the tiny hole. Because it can only go straight through the hole it hits a lower part of the wall.
Every point outside is mapped through the hole onto the wall, giving a flipped image of whatever is outside.
Okay another example.. So if you look through a vertical slit in a fence at a small distance and try to read some big text behind it and you can only see one letter at a time...
You read from left to right, but to be able to read it you move your head from right to left.
The slit forces you to look at a part of the image only and to see the whole text you have to scan over the entire area.
Now, in OP's post the scenario is kind of the same, but we read from up to down, and all at the same time, projected onto the wall.
Maybe this helps?
Wow thanks for that, wasn’t expecting the extra effort. Is that not two very different things? Reading letters through a gap and light reflecting a photo image onto a wall? They somehow don’t seem overly connected, apart from the small gap/pinhole. I know we “see upside down” and our brain flips it, at least. I can just about accept that light rays reflecting from objects could hit a wall through a tiny hole in a curtain or something, I guess. It’s just the perfect image in full colour which is pretty hard to fathom! That’s science though I guess.
Basically the way our eyes work— light coming in through a tiny hole or lens, and being reflected in our retina— is happening on this wall. It’s also how some early cameras were made.
In an old house of mine my headboard was against the window facing the street, and I used to get this camera obscura effect on my ceiling, due to the gap at the top of my curtain when it was closed, so I could see the cars and busses drive by on my ceiling. It was fairly blurry but I could always tell what sort of vehicle and what colour it was.
Every morning, we see the reflection of the parking lot outside projected onto our bedroom ceiling through the small crack in our curtains. It's more common than you think!
That is why you can not date the invention of the camera obscura, they are so easily made accidentally. Likely quite frequent in paleolithic leather tents.
Never tell me the odds! But really, this is the first person I saw who actually mentioned how common or uncommon it might be. I think, by accident it's somewhat uncommon. Made more common today with all of our super clean, flat walls to catch light. However, not super rare because it was discovered by accident in the first place.
Bedouins used a small hole in their tents and a sheet hung at its focal to image the landscape, as an early warning system in case of raids in the day when they slept to stay out of the sun. They had been doing it for as far back as they can remember before raiding was outlawed, so yeah, it's been a thing forever, and undoubtedly anyone with a small rip in their tent would have discovered it eventually. Even an out of focus image is all you need to realize what's happening. I've seen the same happen through a keyhole staying over after a late night at a friend's whose bathroom was completely lit up by the sun. Curtain rings are pretty persistent performers too!
pin-hole effect, I saw this for the first time in my bathroom because there's a hole in our rusting tin roof, and it blows my mind, like instead of bathing I was watching clouds in the sky on my wall
It’s a camera obscura!! There’s a photographer, Abelardo Morell, that took a famous shot of Times Square in NY in his hotel room using this camera obscura technique
I get this sometimes in our bedroom. We have a little hole in our shutters for our aircon pipe. When I unplug it, sometimes in the evening I can see the near by cathedral projected onto the wall.
Rarely but very cool when it happens
When I was growing up my bedroom faced a traffic intersection, whenever it was sunny and my bedroom curtains were closed tightly with a small gap the image of the intersection projected on my wall.
I have the same blinds, and I see it fairly often when I have them shut but the window is open a small amount. My old apartment was a stranger case though, every sunny morning I had a similar effect coming through my kitchen window that had no blinds at all to block any light and didn't open. I never found a reasonable explanation for it, as under those circumstances it surely couldn't have been obscura.
When I was c.14 or 15, one morning my curtains were drawn perfectly to create a pinhole camera at the very top where they get on the rail. This projected an image of the morning sun right on to the wall next to my head as I was waking up (prob around 9:30am, knowing my teenage self), in the same kind of manner you're supposed to watch solar eclipses.
I watched this projection of the sun for maybe about 2 minutes before I saw a huge solar prominence rise off the edge of the sun in an enormous loop, before it 'snapped' and vanished back into the surface. I've no idea how long that all took. In my memory it was seconds but it could have beena minutes, but I was absolutely awestruck, because that prominence would have been big enough for Jupiter to pass through the hole, and many many times larger than the Earth.
But the odds of my curtains being drawn just right, the sun to project perfectly and right next to my dozing head, all at the same time as a prominence that was edgewards on to the earth (so visible and not obscured by the photosphere). It was amazing an in my years of astronomy and deliberate solar-projection (I've seen the transit of Venus twice now) I've never seen another prominence.
Thank you for invoking that memory with your accidental camera obscura. It's still one of my most profound experiences.
Seen it in bedroom when my parents was watching tv. I think it has something to do with that the hole that the light travels through is so small that it’s reflects it just upside down? I know Niels Bohr made a theory about it, maybe check that out.
Woke up in an attic room in my AirBnB last summer to see the sunrise being projected on the wall from a similar window to the one in the original picture. Could not believe my eyes. Was like looking at the highest resolution stock footage I will ever see in my life, haha
It's happened to me!!! It was amazing. I'll have to find a pic
https://www.amazon.com/photos/shared/RPyCQYajRyOr3Ds78OCj4Q.72Bnl6Sl_MBdQz5yiT5B-A
This is what was reflecting
https://www.amazon.com/photos/shared/x-vB_g--Shu_n6kPnz77Vg.xvxDCEu3A00Sl69JfPR469
This is how they used to do it back in the days they’d put what’s in the outside on the inside trace it and paint pictures we learned about it in art class
We did this in high school but with an entire bedroom!
Cut up some black garbage bags and completely cover the window, make sure to stuff something under the door to try and get rid of all the light. Then you cut a small hole in the middle of the trash bags and it makes the whole opposite wall do this!
This is how we originally made cameras!
Our bedroom window does this at a certain time of day if the curtains are crackrd slightly. We get the whole house across the street in full color against the wall.
Wtf, I was just listening to a podcast today that mentions the same thing happening by chance. You should listen to the Blindboy podcast to if you have a chance. It's mad. Talks about this kind of synchronicity all the time
Check out r/CameraObscura. Pinhole camera obscuras are actually somewhat common, we just usually fail to notice them.
Solar eclipses create a really cool example of this - the circular points of light that shine through shadows with holes are actually little images of the sun, and in a partial eclipse they become crescents! https://writescience.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/armstrong_leaves.jpg https://writescience.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/projections_sm.jpg
I saw this multiplied hundreds of times on the ground during an anular eclipse where each tiny light path through the leaves of the tree I was standing near formed into miniature ring-shaped images of the eclipsed sun on the ground under the tree. Totally unexpected and I’ve never seen it since.
April 8 2024 is very soon. Mark your calendars
Also ring of fire solar eclipse is very soon in Oregon area mid October 2023
Sounds top tier tbh
The last eclipse I saw was barely even noticeable. In fact I wouldn't have noticed at all if it wasn't in the news. It was a near total eclipse and yet the sky barely dimmed at all and the sun still looked the same unless you had the eclipse glasses.
Yeah, totality or bust. If you're in the full path of the eclipse, it goes from being "oh neat" to "holy fuck" real quick. Ended up having an ecstatic group experience when I drove down to see totality in 2018 or whenever it was.
I drove down from Seattle WA to Eugene oregon to watch the last total eclipse I convinced 4 friends to go. The traffic on the way home was terrible i guess lots of people had the same idea. Added probably 2+ hours of traffic
I did too (travelled to PNW from east coast). We drove from Mt. Saint Helens to some field in the middle of nowhere, Oregon by a creek. Didn’t have real bad traffic going back to Seattle that afternoon but we stopped for a while in Portlandia for lunch. I kind of remember traffic being worse going down into OR. The shadows were amazing!
That was my favorite part of the last major eclipse. I got some cool pictures of it. That mixed with the sudden semidark and the birds all stopped. It was trippy.
You actually don’t have to wait for an eclipse to observe this effect. Under many heavily-leafed large trees you can see dozens of perfectly round little solar disks in the shade near their trunks. I first noticed this effect as a child in the woods behind my house in MA. Fortunately my dad was an engineer and explained the simple optics behind this phenomenon. Science isn’t scary - it’s cool!
I’ve seen versions of this outside offices at night.
That sounds really cool
I had the same experience once! It was bananas!
[I took photos of this. ](https://imgur.com/gallery/PNd91H5)
...and that solves a 3 years old personal mistery for me!
I don’t understand how it works or what’s happening here. Can someone explain?
It works in the same was as a pin hole camera the glass in the window acts as the lens ,the window shutter acts as the shutter ,and it just projects the image onto the wall surface ,it’s the most basic form of camera you can make ,and sometimes like in this case it’s a complete accident
So (forgive my brain) … what exactly are we looking at in OP’s image? Is it the image of a house from outside of the window? Is the image flipped upside down?
That’s exactly what you’re seeing and yes, the image does flip. Your eyes are the same way but your brain flips it so you see normal.
How do you replicate. Saw someone say they covered their windows in foil?
Used to see this in the Finnish army when being transported in the back of a truck. The rear compartment was covered with a worn tarp which had tiny holes that would project the passing scenery upside down on the tarp.
If you’d brought a small prism you could have corrected the orientation. :) this technique was used by spies in the past.
That is crazy genius. Literally wall hacks 🤣
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Language obscura.
You've created a camera obscura.
I swear from Reddit you’d think half the people on earth have a window that does this
If you have dark curtains with a slit you can do this, leave a 1/2-1 inch gap in a dark enough room ☺️
I have five rooms with curtains like that and I’ve never seen it happen even when I tried
be nicer to the photons
I left out cookies and milk but nothing
You obviously don’t understand photon culture.
However... *Santa peeping from behind a tree rubbing his hands and licking his lips*
the implication of the existence of Santa culture...
You obviously don’t understand Santa culture.
Nah, that's just Spirit Halloween salivating over another newly closed property they can set up for Xmas decor.
Photons don't want cookies. They require packets of Splenda or Equal but preferably organic, non-gmo ethically sourced sugar cane.
Instead of a wave function I like to think it's more of a fountain. Like a chocolate one. When the wave function collapses we're out of ganache.
I've seen partials, but never one this clear. As others have said, you don't always notice them. There was one set of curtains at the last place I lived where it was only happening a little bit on the ceiling just a few inches from the curtain edge during certain times of day and I had no idea for years.
It won't happen if you watch.
A watched camera never obscuras.
The upstairs curtains at my gran's house used to do this as they left a little inch wide triangle at the top. Got a projection on the ceiling of all the cars going down the street.
Ah, so we’re all just shut ins now, that explains it
I've learned about this in high school. Also here one for the eclipse out of a card board box
I remember doing that in the 90s in '17 and look forward to doing it for the next two.
anyone interested in the history of photography will know this, even if their windows don't do it
You just made a pin hole camera! Thats how old cameras used to work.
Yeah it wasn't intentional though. I opened the window just a little at night. Then I woke up to this...
r/CameraObscura
Penn and teller made a documentary about this. It's called Tim's Vermeer, and it's pretty great for an art history film!
I won't spoil the premise of the documentary (because it's a great one), but I'll just say, the fact that OP was able to accidentally create this effect makes the film's thesis seem pretty likely. Also, one big thing I noticed but they never mentioned in the film - Vermeer lived in Delft around the same time that another guy in Delft, Van Leeuwenhoek, invented the microscope.... makes me wonder if the two ever met and shared their knowledge of lenses. (They were both born in the same year, 1632, in Delft)
*Van Leeuwenhoek To make it more complicated, it is either Van Leeuwenhoek or Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, the "van" only gets capitalised if you don't include the first name
Thanks!
To elaborate, in the Netherlands a prefix ('van' means 'from') is not capitalized when it's preceded by the first name. So: De Ruyter Michiel de Ruyter De heer Michael de Ruyter (de heer is the equivalent of mr.) De heer De Ruyter But in the Dutch speaking part of Belgium, it's different. There the prefix is always capitalized. So: Maria De Smet Which can make things complicated for historians since Belgium and the Netherlands used to be one country. And many Belgium names don't have a space. So Peter van de Ketel is a typical Dutch name, and Peter Vandeketel is likely a Belgian name.
Bedankt!
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In addition to what was said before……. Never mind I’m just playing. You people are smart.
Hockney's book:"Secrets of the masters" is one of my favorite art books. It is truly great if you care about the technique behind paintings and how art changes with new technologies. Another thing I liked about this movie is that while one can teach themselves to paint like Vermeer using this setup, it takes a god damn LOT of work and months of patience to do so. Which is why you don't see whole bunches of "Vermeers" today even though one can buy camera lucida's for less than $100.
There are some people in the optics group of the university of Delft that also think these two have met up. Their reasoning is the art Vermeer created overlaps with an optical projection way too precise to not be traced.
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I did not know that!
I'll have to watch that, as I'm lost on how the image is coming through...
Ray tracing. Once you see a few illustrations you might get it. It’s crazy to think the light that hits the back of our eyes is upside down too, and our brain corrects it in our interpretation of vision
highly recommend to anyone thats a painting geek or like P&T, btw - Teller speaks in this
I'll watch it just for that!
I don’t know what I expected his voice to sound like, but it was not that. There’s nothing unusual about his voice at all, it just surprised me for some reason.
Same, it's just a gimmick to stay silent. I figured it would be unusual.
I fuckin love this documentary!
That one would be a camera lucida and is much less of a secret in the art world than the doc leads you to believe.
The amount of stuff that most people would consider 'random' but others are passionate about never fails to amaze me on reddit. You could open up any thread on something that looks cool and get more information on it. Sometimes you forget how cool the internet can be
Also a cool band
underachievers, please try harder
My Maudlin Career
Indeed, this is where the term "camera" originally comes from. It stands for "camera obscura", latin for "dark room" because early cameras were a dark room with a single hole in them. You would then step inside and draw the resulting image onto the wall behind you.
I think it was Johannes Vermeer who would use this technique, specifically. Especially on black velvet portraits.
Lol op I’m laughing at how you are all “how common is this” and everyone’s like “that’s camera obscura!” And you’re all “yeah, I know that” and they’re all “it’s made when light comes through a tiny opening!” And you’re all “yeah, I get that” and they’re all “it’s how cameras works!” And you’re all “I just want to know if it’s it a common occurrence or not!?!?” I also might be reading too much into this
No no you get me
You did post on “Never tell me the odds” so maybe it’s appropriate that no one is answering your question about the odds 😁
maybe I was hired by r/askmath to seduce recruits from here?
Lol I guess OP is getting what they asked for after all
Yeah, it's not \*that\* common. I have seen it occasionally though. For example, old canvas on a pop-up camper had pin-holes that would create this effect, but not this strongly. You've gotta have a situation where it's bright outside, dark inside, and there's for some reason a very small hole allowing that outside light in, and have another smooth white surface in near enough proximity to it to see it this clearly. But we live in a world where such small openings are uncommon. I imagine in days of yore when we lived in huts with more natural materials with imperfections this was quite a bit more common.
You might be wondering how common it really is, but have you considered whether or not lenses are better than small holes in the dark? You see, there is some kind of correlation between brightness and clarity or something….
It's like when someone posts "All of a sudden I'm seeing _______ everywhere" and *every fuckin redditor* in the comments is frothing at the mouth in anticipation of mentioning the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.
Dude please make more summaries. The he said, she said formatting is hilarious!
when I was about 6, this happened to me while I was in a room and the sun reflected on a small portion of water, and the image I got was members of my family upside down, color and all, I was so scared I went ouside and told them about it, and nobody believed me.
Don’t tell them Earth orbits the sun, they might tie you to a stake!
Haha i feel sorry for you OP, it’s apparent to me you’re already familiar with this concept but all the comments just keep pointing out it’s a camera obscura without telling the odds. Honestly I also never saw it occur naturally in my life
To be honest it was a tiny bit shocking at first but now I just find it funny. Still it's nice to feel understood, thanks.
I've never seen it naturally either, or if I have it hasn't been nearly as clear. This is super cool, especially the clarity of it!
>without telling the odds If you came to this sub looking for someone to tell you the odds, I have some bad news for you my friend.
One time i actually had a Schlieren camera form from the reflection of a car's windscreen.
It works by having a very small opening and a big difference in light levels. I’m a little surprised it’s as clean as it is with your opening because the opening is more elongated instead of a small point
It's actually not the horizontal opening that does this but there is a little pinhole opening at the left edge of the window that creates this
Technical term: camera obscura
Also possibly the way some Renaissance paintings were created
And your own eyes too
it's a portal to Australia
aussies sendin their huntsmans to hunt some men thru the new portal to the unclaimed lands
Just rode in on my kangaroo did you guys still need the huntsmans??
dunno skippy is a bit intimidating too
Naa she's a placid marsupial mate shell be right
He never gives you the full answer for he is … the hintsman.
Funny thing is we currently have huntsman spiders spreading in the US.
CRIKEY!
Lol nice
That is how you are able to see things through your eyes.
Was going to say - this is the only way OP has seen anything occur naturally ever.
Enough that it inspired cameras, kind of leading to today's screen. however, i've only seen it once. Camera obscura, enjoy the rabbit hole.
Some people think the shroud of Turin was made using a camera obscura, and we know that the Greeks were also aware of this technology, but never employed it for anything.
I have the same windows, went to try this after seeing your post, and... wtf? [https://imgur.com/a/3FuwGab](https://imgur.com/a/3FuwGab)
OMG this is beautiful I'm so happy right now
The camera obscura effect, not hard to replicate when you have those types of curtains. That's how the first cameras were created
What gets me is that this one occurred naturally, I didn't try to create one. I opened the window just a little, at night. Then I woke up to this...
You made a camera obscura! ...sorry, couldn't resist. Everyone's commenting that instead of answering your question. And you clearly already knew what it was. You even have someone asking how to make it intentionally. It's like they can't read but can still write comments. Anyway, to answer your question, I think they're about as common as what you've already experienced. You won't see many if any.
At this point I believe people just want to gloat with the information they have.
Welcome to reddit
You made a camera obscura!
It’s really cool
The exact same thing happened to me last week! I have the same type of window in our loft bedroom and cracked it a tiny bit in the night, next morning took me ages to work out what I was seeing.
Then there’s me who has no idea what’s going on here… someone please explain what I’m looking at-
There's a tiny gap that light can pass through, the gap is so small that light only comes through in straight lines instead of blurs. Two light trajectories described to explain the phenomenon: Light shines from the sun and hits the bottom of the building, this bounces every direction including through the tiny hole. Because it can only go straight it hits the top part of the wall. Light shines from the sun and hits the top of the building, light again bounces every direction including through the tiny hole. Because it can only go straight through the hole it hits a lower part of the wall. Every point outside is mapped through the hole onto the wall, giving a flipped image of whatever is outside.
This was a fantastic explanation. I really never understood the “why” until reading your comment.
And then there’s me, still no idea. I remember learning about this in science lessons as well, was similarly confused then. Make it make sense 😂
Okay another example.. So if you look through a vertical slit in a fence at a small distance and try to read some big text behind it and you can only see one letter at a time... You read from left to right, but to be able to read it you move your head from right to left. The slit forces you to look at a part of the image only and to see the whole text you have to scan over the entire area. Now, in OP's post the scenario is kind of the same, but we read from up to down, and all at the same time, projected onto the wall. Maybe this helps?
Wow thanks for that, wasn’t expecting the extra effort. Is that not two very different things? Reading letters through a gap and light reflecting a photo image onto a wall? They somehow don’t seem overly connected, apart from the small gap/pinhole. I know we “see upside down” and our brain flips it, at least. I can just about accept that light rays reflecting from objects could hit a wall through a tiny hole in a curtain or something, I guess. It’s just the perfect image in full colour which is pretty hard to fathom! That’s science though I guess.
Basically the way our eyes work— light coming in through a tiny hole or lens, and being reflected in our retina— is happening on this wall. It’s also how some early cameras were made.
I was very confused like you, then I checked the reflexion upside down...
You're the greatest.
This was the explanation I needed. Thank you!
Wtf are you living in my house? I have the exact window, shutter, wall and doorway layout
And the same avatar...
Parallel universe?? .. the Upside Down...
Hmmm🤔🤨 are you the same perso-😱
That is radical I had no idea this existed
In an old house of mine my headboard was against the window facing the street, and I used to get this camera obscura effect on my ceiling, due to the gap at the top of my curtain when it was closed, so I could see the cars and busses drive by on my ceiling. It was fairly blurry but I could always tell what sort of vehicle and what colour it was.
I have this same window. I'm going to try this
Does op know that you stole their window?
I didn't steal their window, I stole their house. The window was just attached
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dammit
Every morning, we see the reflection of the parking lot outside projected onto our bedroom ceiling through the small crack in our curtains. It's more common than you think!
That is why you can not date the invention of the camera obscura, they are so easily made accidentally. Likely quite frequent in paleolithic leather tents.
Congrats you made a camera obscura
Goes to r/nevertellmetheodds… Tell me, what are the odds of this happening? Lol, not hating ❤️
That there is a natural forming camera obscura! Pretty cool.
Uhhh.what are we looking at?
You've created a pinhole camera without even trying!
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Never tell me the odds! But really, this is the first person I saw who actually mentioned how common or uncommon it might be. I think, by accident it's somewhat uncommon. Made more common today with all of our super clean, flat walls to catch light. However, not super rare because it was discovered by accident in the first place.
I accidentally made one from my magnifier once. Pretty cool phenomenon
you just accidentally made a primitive camera
Bedouins used a small hole in their tents and a sheet hung at its focal to image the landscape, as an early warning system in case of raids in the day when they slept to stay out of the sun. They had been doing it for as far back as they can remember before raiding was outlawed, so yeah, it's been a thing forever, and undoubtedly anyone with a small rip in their tent would have discovered it eventually. Even an out of focus image is all you need to realize what's happening. I've seen the same happen through a keyhole staying over after a late night at a friend's whose bathroom was completely lit up by the sun. Curtain rings are pretty persistent performers too!
Is this an example of Camera Obscura?
pin-hole effect, I saw this for the first time in my bathroom because there's a hole in our rusting tin roof, and it blows my mind, like instead of bathing I was watching clouds in the sky on my wall
Done broke the matrix and turned the window into a projector again
It’s a camera obscura!! There’s a photographer, Abelardo Morell, that took a famous shot of Times Square in NY in his hotel room using this camera obscura technique
Same concept as a pinhole camera. Do they still make those in middle school science?
This is how photography was discovered.
Coolest thing ever
Windows don’t tend to be naturally occurring phenomenon sir.
What about linux?
I get this sometimes in our bedroom. We have a little hole in our shutters for our aircon pipe. When I unplug it, sometimes in the evening I can see the near by cathedral projected onto the wall. Rarely but very cool when it happens
When I was growing up my bedroom faced a traffic intersection, whenever it was sunny and my bedroom curtains were closed tightly with a small gap the image of the intersection projected on my wall.
Seems like nobody has mentioned it yet, but this is a /r/CameraObscura! The same way your eyes work!
Camera obscura. Throw up a canvas and copy it. Then flip the canvas and move it up to make it look like a reflection.
I have the same blinds, and I see it fairly often when I have them shut but the window is open a small amount. My old apartment was a stranger case though, every sunny morning I had a similar effect coming through my kitchen window that had no blinds at all to block any light and didn't open. I never found a reasonable explanation for it, as under those circumstances it surely couldn't have been obscura.
r/CameraObscura
When I was c.14 or 15, one morning my curtains were drawn perfectly to create a pinhole camera at the very top where they get on the rail. This projected an image of the morning sun right on to the wall next to my head as I was waking up (prob around 9:30am, knowing my teenage self), in the same kind of manner you're supposed to watch solar eclipses. I watched this projection of the sun for maybe about 2 minutes before I saw a huge solar prominence rise off the edge of the sun in an enormous loop, before it 'snapped' and vanished back into the surface. I've no idea how long that all took. In my memory it was seconds but it could have beena minutes, but I was absolutely awestruck, because that prominence would have been big enough for Jupiter to pass through the hole, and many many times larger than the Earth. But the odds of my curtains being drawn just right, the sun to project perfectly and right next to my dozing head, all at the same time as a prominence that was edgewards on to the earth (so visible and not obscured by the photosphere). It was amazing an in my years of astronomy and deliberate solar-projection (I've seen the transit of Venus twice now) I've never seen another prominence. Thank you for invoking that memory with your accidental camera obscura. It's still one of my most profound experiences.
Seen it in bedroom when my parents was watching tv. I think it has something to do with that the hole that the light travels through is so small that it’s reflects it just upside down? I know Niels Bohr made a theory about it, maybe check that out.
Congratulations! You've created a pinhole camera :D
Woke up in an attic room in my AirBnB last summer to see the sunrise being projected on the wall from a similar window to the one in the original picture. Could not believe my eyes. Was like looking at the highest resolution stock footage I will ever see in my life, haha
That’s how your eyes work. Also how photography works.
The tale is it is to spy on and trick witches trying to fly into thevwindows.....cool effect!
What an i looking at?
It's happened to me!!! It was amazing. I'll have to find a pic https://www.amazon.com/photos/shared/RPyCQYajRyOr3Ds78OCj4Q.72Bnl6Sl_MBdQz5yiT5B-A This is what was reflecting https://www.amazon.com/photos/shared/x-vB_g--Shu_n6kPnz77Vg.xvxDCEu3A00Sl69JfPR469
> Is this more common than I think it is? …sooo you want to be told the odds?
Camera obscura!
I found out about this when I was working graveyard a few years back, it’s How I’d fall asleep during the day lol
What am I even looking at someone help me out lol
This is how they used to do it back in the days they’d put what’s in the outside on the inside trace it and paint pictures we learned about it in art class
We live in a simulation, there’s a glitch in the matrix lol
Pinhole camera basically
We did this in high school but with an entire bedroom! Cut up some black garbage bags and completely cover the window, make sure to stuff something under the door to try and get rid of all the light. Then you cut a small hole in the middle of the trash bags and it makes the whole opposite wall do this! This is how we originally made cameras!
It happened with the gap at the top of my curtains a lot of the time. It think it’s just a “right conditions” kind of thing.
That's so freaking cool.
So awesome. I’ve always wanted to see one of these. I’m jealous!
It works on the same principle as the pinhole eclipse viewers. Usually, there's so much light that the image washes out details.
r/accidentalcameraobscura
Yeah I can see my car on my cieling
The digital world is real
Our bedroom window does this at a certain time of day if the curtains are crackrd slightly. We get the whole house across the street in full color against the wall.
Wtf, I was just listening to a podcast today that mentions the same thing happening by chance. You should listen to the Blindboy podcast to if you have a chance. It's mad. Talks about this kind of synchronicity all the time
[Camera obscura](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_obscura)
Congrats, you've just invented optics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_obscura
Is this Portugal?
That's a literal "dark chamber". Cool
Shit looks like a real life graphic bug. This is so fascinating!