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Normally, light waves from the sun travel straight through the atmosphere to your eye.

But, light travels at different speeds through hot air and cold air. Mirages happen when the ground is very hot and the air is cool.

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The hot ground warms a layer of air just above the ground. When the light moves through the cold air and into the layer of hot air it is refracted bent. A layer of very warm air near the ground refracts the light from the sky nearly into a U-shaped bend. Our brain thinks the light has travelled in a straight line.

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Our brain doesn't see the image as bent light from the sky. Instead, our brain thinks the light must have come from something on the ground. You can even see mirages in the UK. Have you ever seen a wet looking shimmer above tarmac on a hot day? Follow us on twitter and keep up with all the latest on physics. Did you know that you could make , slices of toast with the energy from a bolt of lightning?

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Marvin and Milo Twitter Follow us on twitter and keep up with all the latest on physics. An inferior mirage is called "inferior" because the mirage is located under the real object. The real object in an inferior mirage is the blue sky or any distant therefore bluish object in that same direction. The mirage causes the observer to see a bright and bluish patch on the ground in the distance which is also called oasis mirage. Light rays coming from a particular distant object all travel through nearly the same air layers and all are bent over about the same amount.

Therefore, rays coming from the top of the object will arrive lower than those from the bottom. The image usually is upside down, enhancing the illusion that the sky image seen in the distance is really a water or oil puddle acting as a mirror. Inferior images are not stable. Hot air rises, and cooler air being more dense descends, so the layers will mix, giving rise to turbulence.

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The image will be distorted accordingly. It may be vibrating; it may be vertically extended towering or horizontally extended stooping.

Mirage, refraction or reflection

If there are several temperature layers, several mirages may mix, perhaps causing double images. In any case, mirages are usually not larger than about half a degree high same apparent size as the sun and moon and from objects only a few kilometers away. Heat haze, also called heat shimmer, refers to the inferior mirage experienced when viewing objects through a layer of heated air; for example, viewing objects across hot asphalt or through the exhaust gases produced by jet engines.

When appearing on roads due to the hot asphalt, it is often referred to as a highway mirage. Convection causes the temperature of the air to vary, and the variation between the hot air at the surface of the road and the denser cool air above it creates a gradient in the refractive index of the air. This produces a blurred shimmering effect, which affects the ability to resolve objects, the effect being increased when the image is magnified through a telescope or telephoto lens. Light from the sky at a shallow angle to the road is refracted by the index gradient, making it appear as if the sky is reflected by the road's surface.

The mind interprets this as a pool of water on the road, since water also reflects the sky.

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The illusion fades as one gets closer. On tarmac roads it may look as if water, or even oil, has been spilled. These kinds of inferior mirages are often called "desert mirages" or "highway mirages".

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Heat haze is not related to the atmospheric phenomenon of haze. A superior mirage occurs when the air below the line of sight is colder than the air above it.

This unusual arrangement is called a temperature inversion , since warm air above cold air is the opposite of the normal temperature gradient of the atmosphere. Passing through the temperature inversion, the light rays are bent down, and so the image appears above the true object, hence the name superior. Superior mirages are in general less common than inferior mirages, but, when they do occur, they tend to be more stable, as cold air has no tendency to move up and warm air has no tendency to move down.

Superior mirages are quite common in polar regions , especially over large sheets of ice that have a uniform low temperature. Superior mirages also occur at more moderate latitudes, although in those cases they are weaker and tend to be less smooth and stable. For example, a distant shoreline may appear to tower and look higher and, thus, perhaps closer than it really is. Because of the turbulence, there appear to be dancing spikes and towers.