Eclipsed Reflection

When opportunity meets with spontaneity and unbridled enthusiasm, Murphy is always present to leverage the lack of proper preparation. I've been a fan of watching reflections of the Sun off the windows of our downtown high-rises for a couple of decades, as many of you know. More recently, Luca Vanzella has been the catalyst to stepping up our game to catching the Moon's reflection. There are numerous possibilities from different sightlines, which up to this point I have merely cataloged as byproducts on each of our rise/set reference images. We've now added the possibilities from south and north faces. Because reflections are angled or backwards to the rises, it was time to create a proper target list and re-sort it against the reflection azimuths.

During the holidays I had some time I could put into this, so I've been going at it... and it's taken much longer than I had anticipated. It's a dozen or so buildings, with a couple of faces from more than a dozen sightlines. The idea of course is to frontload the work so that identifying events in the future is mostly automated leaving only the choice to be done within a couple of days of heading out. Thankfully the buildings don't move!

So after a few late nights and half-days of plugging at the numbers, I noted that the afternoon setting Sun (on December 30th) would be in position to reflect from the Sunlife and Sunlife Place buildings (right near the Shaw Conference Centre), as seen from across the river on Strathearn Crescent. With only an hour to go before the event, I eagerly gathered my stuff and headed out.

I was greeted by a lovely skyline, and a bright reflection from a small building along the bank to the east:

But the only two buildings I was expecting to be ablaze in sunlight were flat gray! Was my math wrong? Had the Sun sunk too low? Nope. After a bit of mentally picturing where the buildings were in relation to each other, I realized that my two office towers were being eclipsed by the Telus building! I waited until sunset hoping to get a sliver along an edge, but alas, no.

A great web-app for exactly this sort of phenomenon is TPE, the photographer's ephemeris, the very tool I use for figuring out precise angles. Below is the view at the event time. The pin lies between the two Sunlife towers; the heavy orange line denotes sunset, while the thin orange line towards the lower left is the line towards the Sun. As you can see, Telus is right in front for light coming in from the southwest.

In my haste to record the event I skipped past a careful look at TPE! Well, now I know to also look for obstructions. And finally, I have removed the data lines for this reflection angle from my database. I'm sure there are a few more of these lurking among the possibilities.