Raytracing and quantifying the inferior mirage

Abstract

Using custom raytracing code, we explore several features of the inferior mirage that are not widely discussed, such as the blurring in the mirage image, and what happens to the light in the direct image region that is replaced by the mirage image. The raytracing model also clarifies how to quantify the mirage, and we provide expressions to calculate the angular extent of the mirage under given thermal conditions and measurement geometry.