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Reflections in corners. Look into a mirror and you see... a mirror image. What if you look into...

If you look into the corner of the intersection between two mirrors at right angles, at 60 degrees, 45 degrees etc you get a series of confusingly-behaved reflections. Think about them and explain.

If you have a bit of cash and suitable tools, explore and explain what you see if you let three mirrors meet at a corner, in particular, two can be normal rectangular mirrirs, but you can do a bit of geometry and cut triangles at various angles to make corner cubes, sixty-degree-corners and so on. (Trickier than it sounds!)

But now, something that I would love to see would be cones of good glass or optical grades of plastic that one could look into from below. I have ideas about what they would show, but has anyone seen such things in real life?

Or is there a good bit of ray-tracing freeware that would help?

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Categories: Technology.

Tags: mirrors, Corner-reflectors, Conical-reflectors.

 

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petethebloke says:

Jon,

Searching ray tracing at Sourceforge brings up a few hits. I'm just installing RayViz to see what it looks like.

EDIT: Don't bother with RayViz - not what you wanted at all.

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Tags: mirrors, Corner-reflectors, Conical-reflectors.

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posted on 2010-09-28 09:11:00 | Report abuse

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Jon-Richfield says:

Hi Pete, Sorry, not very much in circulation just now. I downloaded POV, which looks more than adequate, but I don't have the time to learn it any time soon... ("Twas ever thus!)

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Tags: mirrors, Corner-reflectors, Conical-reflectors.

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posted on 2010-09-29 19:08:59 | Report abuse


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stephenf says:

Not quite what you are asking for but: in the case of light / radiation entering the cone (from the sun, e.g.) it is possible to heat an object at the "point of the cone" to above the effective temperature of the sun. This is "non- imaging optics" which is not reversable.  Imaging optics says that the temperature at the image of the sun can never be above that of the "source". Else the Second law of Thermodynamics would be violated.   

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Tags: mirrors, Corner-reflectors, Conical-reflectors.

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posted on 2010-10-06 21:54:57 | Report abuse


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