Blue Ray of Sunrise over Mont Blanc

By Lord Kelvin

Nature LX, 411 (August 31, 1899)


Looking out at 4 o'clock this morning from a balcony of this hotel, 1545 metres above sea-level, and about 68 kilometres W. 18° S. from Mont Blanc, I had a magnificent view of Alpine ranges of Switzerland, Savoy, and Dauphiné; perfectly clear and sharp on the morning twilight sky. This promised me an opportunity for which I had been waiting five or six years; to see the earliest instantaneous light of sunrise through very clear air, and find whether it was perceptibly blue. I therefore resolved to watch an hour till sunrise, and was amply rewarded by all the splendours I saw. Having only vague knowledge of the orientation of the hotel, I could not at first judge whereabouts the sun would rise; but in the course of half an hour rosy tints on each side of the place of strongest twilight showed me that it would be visible from the balcony; and I was helped to this conclusion by Haidinger's brushes when the illumination of the air at greater altitudes by a brilliant half-moon nearly overhead, was overpowered by sunlight streaming upwards from beyond the mountains. A little later, beams of sunlight and shadows of distant mountains converged clearly to a point deep under the very summit of Mont Blanc. In the course of five or ten minutes I was able to watch the point of convergence travelling obliquely upwards till in an instant I saw a blue light against the sky on the southern profile of Mont Blanc; which, in less than one-twentieth of a second became dazzlingly white, like a brilliant electric arc-light. I had no dark glass at hand, so I could not any longer watch the rising sun.

— Kelvin, Hotel du Mont-Revard, above Aix-les-Bains, August 27, 1899