A friend of mine sent me these pictures showing multiple shadows

[merlyn]

TL;DR Summary

A friend of mine sent me these pictures showing multiple shadows

A friend of mine send me these pictures showing three shadows during the day.
The time of day was approx 11:45 and it was overcast. He asked me what was causing this effect.
Basically you see three shadows. My hypothesis is that the overcast is diffusing the light causing scattering and the photons are not all parallel, due to this there are multiple shadows. What do you all think?

Drforbin.

 

[Drakkith]

To guess, I'd say that one shadow is caused by the Sun shining somewhat more brightly through the overcast clouds than the scattered light. The 2nd is probably caused by light being scattered/reflected by the clouds preferentially back in the opposite direction from the Sun.

 

[DaveC426913]

Agree with Drakkith.

At first I thought perhaps it was just one big diffuse-edged shadow with the whole sky as the light source. But the edges of the shadows in the pic are quite well-defined, not diffuse.

So I'd say one shadow is for the sun and the other shadow is from a large, discrete cloud that is efficiently reflecting the sun back.

It's kind of a pity that merlyn's friend didn't just angle the camera upward, and then he wouldn't be guessing - and neither would we.

 

[Tom.G]

I agree... especially as the vehicles are not in direct sunlight. This is indicated by the shadow-line on the grass median near the bridge.

 

[jbriggs444]

At first I thought perhaps it was just one big diffuse-edged shadow with the whole sky as the light source. But the edges of the shadows in the pic are quite well-defined, not diffuse.

They look well-defined. But we are looking an extremely fore-shortened image of a long object. This would naturally make a fuzzy edge appear sharper.