Crystal ball Claude Alexander, was often billed as "Alexander the Crystal Seer". A crystal ball is essentially a bi-convex spherical lens with a uniform radius of curvature, although without its edges and center material truncated as in a conventional lens construction. Thus the principles of optics may be applied to analyze its imaging characteristics. As a lens, a transparent sphere of any material with refractive index greater than one bends rays of light to a focal point. An image is formed with significant coma, field curvature, and other optical aberrations inherent to spherical lenses. The refractive index of typical materials used for
Crepuscular rays Crepuscular rays Crepuscular rays (more commonly known as sunbeams, sun rays, splintered light, or god rays), in atmospheric optics, are rays of sunlight that appear to radiate from the point in the sky where the Sun is located. Shining through openings in clouds (particularly stratocumulus) or between other objects, these columns of sunlit particulates are separated by darker cloud-shadowed volumes. Despite seeming to converge toward the light source, the rays are in fact near-parallel shafts of sunlight. Their apparent convergence is a perspective effect. This phenomenon mimics the way parallel railway lines or long hallways, for example, seem to seek