“You have a halo that I can’t see.”

I used to tell my students they had halos, when we walked from the school to the church early Friday mornings. I was responsible for the student lectors and would take them to church when the dew was often still on the grass, to practice their reading. Sometimes I’d encourage them to spend ten seconds looking at their shadows in the grass and checking out the brightness of the dewdrops around their own heads. Some of them could see it and some couldn’t. It’s easier to see the brightness if you move your head a bit and watch a specific section of grass grow brighter or darker depending on your position. This phenomenon, known as the Heilegenschein, is tricky to see the first time. 

My father tried to show me my halo, when I was a little girl. On early morning walks to visit my Aunt Margie, three blocks away, he would encourage me to look at the dewy grass and my shadow on it. It’s not clear to me that I understood then what I was looking for, let alone what it was telling me, but I’m older now so I’ll just explain it.

When you look at the shadow of your head, your eyes are directly in line between the light source, and the shadow. If the surface that the shadow falls on has transparent beads on it, such as drops of dew, or the glass balls that the highway department includes in highway paint, or the dust on the moon that is made up of tiny, glassy beads, it will reflect the light that falls on it. No doubt, the light is reflected in several directions, but some of it bounces almost straight back towards the light source, and in the process encounters — your eyes. Thus, you see a bit of shining light around the shadow of your head. So you, only you, have a halo. You can’t see anyone else’s halo. You can’t see that anyone else has a halo!

My father said the Benvenuto Cellini saw this halo around his head and became puffed up with pride. So much so that he killed someone. I do not know if this is true. I don’t know who Cellini is because I never cared to look up a murderer. (1600’s artist?) I don’t know if he really committed a murder or if he saw his own halo or if my father even really told me this story. This is my memory but I also remember that my memory is faulty.

When I put Heiligenschein into Google on Safari it gave me some googledygook. I tried it on Firefox with a different prompt, “astronauts seeing shine around their shadows.” Firefox gave me the correct term, “Heilegenschein” and said that ‘Buzz Aldrin specifically mentioned seeing a

“halo around my own shadow, around the shadow of my helmet.” 

My father had imagined for years that the effect would be present on the moon. 

Here is a picture from Wikimedia Commons showing the halo effect.

Matzematik at German Wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

UPDATE on novel: I’m working on cover problems with my cover artist. Sigh.