A doctor in Hualien has photographed the green flash (綠閃) that sometimes occurs right after sunset or right before sunrise, becoming the first person in Taiwan to capture the rare optical phenomenon.
Chen Chi-hsiung (陳志雄), a doctor at the Mennonite Christian Hospital in Hualien, said the green flash — a green spot visible above the upper rim of the disk of the sun — usually lasts for no more than a second or two, making it extremely difficult to photograph.
One has to have the timing and distance calculated perfectly to get a picture, Chen said on Thursday.
Screengrab from Atmospheric Optics’s Web site
Since May last year, Chen has gone every morning to the roof of the hospital building, which is near the sea, to try to capture the elusive flash.
He had originally thought that it would be difficult during the seasonal northeasterly winds, but due to two consecutive periods of good weather early this month, he was able to capture the sunrise green flash.
“It was very hard to get the right timing over the past year, because Taiwan is located in a subtropical region, and most of the time it is foggy over the Pacific Ocean. I would often go to the top of the building and immediately come down again after just taking a look,” Chen said.
An astronomy fan since childhood, he started astrophotography four years ago.
He said that people usually think photographing a green flash is only possible under a clear sky with no clouds, but said the picture he has taken disproves the theory.
Photographing a sunrise green flash is considered to be even more difficult to capture than a sunset green flash, and his picture was particularly appreciated because of this.
His photograph appears on the Web site www.atoptics.co.uk/fza49.htm.
Green flashes occur because the atmosphere causes the light from the sun to separate into different colors.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching