While fidgeting with a pair of reading glasses, I noticed a strange reflection pattern (shown in video and photo).
I would appreciate it if anyone that knows more about this could help me figure out why there were eight dots in the reflection instead of four, and why there were different colors when all the light sources were an orange/yellow/warm color.
There were eight dots in each frame, four orange, four green. They made a cube shape, each one of the dots being a corner of the cube. The same image could be seen in each frame, and if I focused my eyes it looked 3d.
The picture below shows the light source that the reflection came from, just four ordinary ceiling lights. I know it couldn't have been anything else because it was night, and to test this I turned off all other lights and it was still there. In fact it was then even brighter. I looked into the glasses again in the morning, the effect was still there.
Thanks,
Ella
Best Answer
Think that it's just the reflection of the four lights off your glasses, with one set of four reflections being due to the lights directly reflecting off the glass surfaces. The other four reflections are probably due to the remaining light passing into the glasses and then reflecting off the rear glass-air surface that it encounters when it tries to exit the glass. The fact that the reflections have different color tints may be due to an anti-reflection coating on the glasses, which causes some colors to be reflected slightly more strongly than others, or due to a slight tint in the glass itself. See diagram below.
Note that according to the diagram there should be more reflections than the eight lights that you noted in each glass lens because the light continues to bounce back and forth inside the glasses. If you look closely, you may be able to detect another set of four reflected lights due to the "3rd reflection" shown in the diagram. The 4th reflection and higher may be too faint to see, though.