how does the atmosphere produce mirages?
155210
Atmosphere doesn't produce them it's just heated air rising up, and a very large area, like a desert, it's so dense that it create a mirror effect, look like water...
64650
At sun set light travells through dense layers of air close to the surface of earth. These layers are usually loaded with dust particles or water molucles (at lacks and seas). Hwen lihgt passes through these dense areas the particles in the air act as a prism to disperse seven clours of light. Red ligt being the most powerful (shortest wave length) becomes more visible and so sky looks red. However, due to variations of percentage of particles in air different sheds of red colours are experienced at different places and at the same place  on different days.
681245
Contrails form through the injection of water vapor into the atmosphere by exhaust fumes from a jet engine. If there is sufficient mixing between the cold upper tropospheric air and the hot exhaust gases to produce a state of saturation, ice crystals will develop.
329581
What you saw was a dustdevil, a cousin of the tornado.  In the desert, the land heats up very quickly in the summer time and a thermal forms. A thermal is a upward rising parcel of air, that can cause a swirl as it rises, and is also called an updraft, which also can occur in a supercell thunderstorm, which almost always produce tornadoes. The dustdevil can be as strong as a minimal tornado (F-0) at just around 70-75 mph, or a minimal hurricane. They are often short lived events and are usually only a 100 feet tall at most.
388414
refraction from the atmosphere magnifies.  When the moon, or sun, is low on the horizon, you're looking through more of the atmosphere to see it.
401971
when the light from the stars enter the earth's atmosphere, the light wave bends and refracted until it reach our eyes. So because it is refracted, when we look at it, it seems to be twinkling.
629239
because the earths atmosphere acts like a lens, so the lower the sun or moon to the horizon then the larger they appear :)
729148
Our atmosphere -- the gaseous envelope surrounding the Earth -- is composed of several gases, primarily nitrogen, oxygen, argon and carbon dioxide. Water vapor and minute bits of dust, salt and clay-silicate particles swirl about in the mixture.\nThe atmosphere has four vertical layers that radiate from Earth and vary by temperature and composition. Proceeding from the ground outward, they are the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere and thermosphere.\n\n\nAll of the “optical phenomena” – halos, sun dogs, sun pillars, coronas and rainbows – are produced at specific levels in the troposphere, which extends from the surface up to about 12 kilometers, eight miles or 42,000 feet depending on which measuring stick you pick. Here, the temperature decreases rapidly with altitude – averaging 59°F at the surface and a right chilly -69°F at 11 km. Commercial jets fly in the upper reaches of the troposphere.\n\n\nHigh-level cirrus clouds form in extremely cold air where water vapor condenses on tiny dust and salt particles to form ice \ncrystals.\nHence these are responsible for various phenomena circles aroound light emitting/reflecting bodies on the sky, and the rings are formed depending upon how the light gets scattered and the colours also depend on that.\nVR
471363
A hologram is a 3d image of an object.  If you look at one you may try to reach out and touch it but nothing is there.\n\nWe don't actually see objects, we see the light that is reflected from them.  If that light is bent somehow the image will change and the appearance of the object will be different than the case of no interference.  We try to extrapolate what was actually there based on the light that reaches our eyes (and the extrapolation is distorted if the light gets bent).\n\nIn short, the mirage is a real image, but it is not a real object.
14052
First of all, we need to remember that sunlight contains all the colors of the rainbow (after all, sunlight can be used to make rainbows!) Now, as sunlight travels through the atmosphere, it bumps into things. If it bumps into something big (like a bird, a plane, or Superman), it stops creating a shadow on the other side of the object. But if it bumps into something small, like water vapor or other molecules of gas, it gets sent into a slightly different direction than before (physicists would say that it "scattered") This scattering, however, is not the same for all colors; light at the blueish end gets scattered more than light at the redish end. So imagine a ray of light hitting the atmosphere at an angle. As it passes through, the various gases make the blue light spread out (some of it toward the earth and folks watching the sky) while the red light hardly gets scattered at all and zips by the planet. That's also why the sky on the moon is black even during the daytime. The moon has no atmosphere so nothing can bend some of the light (of any color) back to the surface.
490916
In geometrical optics with a pointlike sun the airplane would cast a shodow on the surface.\n\nBut: 1) The sun isn't pointlike but appears as a disc in the sky, so if light from diffent edges of the disc would cross under the plane ther would be no sharp shadow anymore, from a viewpoint on the surface the plane wouldn't cover the sun as whole\n\n2) Light is a wave, so geometic optics is not the whole story, there is refraction that bends the light into the shadow region. That's what you call "refill the void".
186531
There are more than a hundred-odd 'sun's in our skies, of which our Sun [one of the smallest among these 'sun's] is the closest to us !\nAs the Earth and other planets are in constant orbit around our Sun, it obviously appears to be in the sky ! \n...Incidentally, what we commonly call our 'sky' is also a mere 'mirage', or optical illusion : It only consists of various 'atmospheric' gases [and moisture-laden clouds that float in them], plus an upper ozone-layer - all of which the light rays from the Sun illuminate. \nThis illumination causes us to imagine that there is a blanket-like bluish 'sky' above us ! As the Sun also seems to be 'up there', we say in non-technical words that the 'Sun is in the sky' !
538914
ATMOSPHERE,LIGHT WAVES see my source for details.
256423
Thunderstorms form when significant condensation, resulting in the production of a wide range of water droplets and ice crystals, occurs in an atmosphere that is unstable and supports deep, rapid upward motion. This often occurs in the presence of three conditions: sufficient moisture accumulated in the lower atmosphere, reflected by high dewpoint temperatures; a significant fall in air temperature with increasing height, known as a steep lapse rate; and a force such as mechanical convergence along a cold front that will focus the lift.
1013494
I think it happens from an excess of silicon and suns rays. Oh, and drugs, lots of drugs. I don't know, I am just hanging around here to see what kind of answers you get.
416939
There are chemicals in the air and its just how the light might have been bent. There are tons of different atmospheric problems that could have caused that.
570098
Clouds form when the invisible water vapor in the air condenses into visible water droplets or ice crystals. This can happen in three ways.\n\n1. The air is cooled below its saturation point. This happens when the air comes in contact with a cold surface or a surface that is cooling by radiation, or the air is cooled by adiabatic expansion (rising). This can happen\n\nalong warm and cold fronts (frontal lift), \nwhere air flows up the side of a mountain and cools as it rises higher into the atmosphere (orographic lift), \nby the convection caused by the warming of a surface by insolation (diurnal heating), \nwhen warm air blows over a colder surface such as a cool body of water. \n2. Clouds can be formed when two air masses below saturation point mix. Examples are breath on a cold day, aircraft contrails, and Arctic sea smoke.\n\n3. The air stays the same temperature but absorbs more water vapor into it until it reaches saturation.\n\n\nand there's lots more at....