The etching shown above is based on the drawing of Austrian mountaineer, cartographer and landscape
artist, Julius von Payer, and was published in the 30 December 1871 issue of
Illustrirte Zeitung. The halo phenomenon was sketched in Dove Bay in the region
previously known as King William’s Land, the northernmost area the Second German
North Polar Expedition reached.
In the mid-19th century, German
ambitions to explore to North Polar region resulted in two expeditions. The
first, in 1868, got as far as latitude 81°5' near Spitsbergen, but could
not reach its planned destination and yielded no significant scientific
achievement. The second one was a more extensive journey and aimed at getting
to know the central Arctic regions with a planned wintering in the hitherto unexplored
northeastern Greenland.
It was on 15 June 1869, when the two
schooners, Germania and its supply
vessel Hansa left Bremerhaven. The
captain of Germania was Carl Koldewey, who had already gathered experience in
polar journeys during the previous German expedition. After about a month, the two ships met pack
ice and got separated due to misreading the flag signs. Hansa was not fortunate: it was crushed by the ice and sank at
latitude 70°32', a few kms from the Greenland coast. Its crew of 13 spent the
winter in a coal dust briquette shelter and was finally saved.
Germania, with its crew of 15 men, reached Sabine Island, where the wintering
camp was established. In the autumn of 1869 and spring 1870, they made
sledge explorations, reaching the
northernmost latitude of 76°30'N. The investigations were led by Payer and the
most significant achievement was the discovery of Kaiser Franz Joseph Fjord,
named after the Austro-Hungarian emperor, who had contributed to the expedition with
significant donations. The return of Germania
was adventurous. The engine broke, but finally she defeated pack ice, and managed
to return to Bremerhaven on 11 September 1870, mostly by using sail.
The Illustrirte
Zeitung article does not comment much on the peculiarities of the display
witnessed by the explorers. It explains that parhelia are formed by the
reflection of sunlight on ice crystals and then explains that sometimes a double
ring and colourful arches may form, and even a horizontal line starting from
the Sun (i.e.: the parhelic circle). The article then continues with praising
the magnificent colours of the display.
By Ágnes Kiricsi
It is a little weird have such simple schematic image of halos on the picture with such realistic landscape
ReplyDeleteYeah, it looks like plastered there as an afterthought and my initial impression when first seeing this was that was there actually any halo display at all, but just something copied from earlier works.
ReplyDeleteAlso imagine that the etching was made by someone who had probably never seen a halo. He got Payer's drawing, and he had to create this image based on that. All this person saw in Payer's original was symmetrical circles and arcs in the sky, which he had to reproduce somehow, although he had no idea what they looked like in reality.
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