Abstract
DURING my summer visits to San Francisco, I have been so frequently struck with the beautiful miniature mirages that can be seen on the flagstone sidewalks whenever the sun shines, that I determined to secure, if possible, a photograph of the phenomenon on a scale suitable for reproduction. One or two previous attempts in past years having been partial failures owing to the smallness of the image, I secured, through the kindness of a friend, the use of a very fine tele-objective capable of giving an image six or eight times as large as an ordinary objective of 12 inches focus. The streets over some of the hills are so laid out that it is possible, on nearing the brow, to bring the eye on the level of the side-walk, and look along a perfectly level stretch of one hundred yards or more. Standing in this position it is almost impossible to resist the conviction that the walk is flooded with a perfectly smooth sheet of water, in which the reflections of pedestrians can be seen as distinctly as in a mirror.
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WOOD, R. Mirage on City Pavements. Nature 58, 596 (1898). https://doi.org/10.1038/058596a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/058596a0
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