Harz Mountains in the context of "House Urns culture"

The North German Plain or Northern Lowland (German: Norddeutsches Tiefland) is one of the major geographical regions of Germany. It is the German part of the North European Plain. The region is bounded by the coasts of the North Sea and the Baltic Sea to the north, Germany's Central Uplands (die Mittelgebirge) to the south, by the Netherlands to the west and Poland to the east.

In the west, the southern boundary of the North German Plain is formed by the Lower Saxon Hills: specifically the ridge of the Teutoburg Forest, the Wiehen Hills, the Weser Hills and the Lower Saxon Börde, which partly separate it from that area of the Plain known as the Westphalian Lowland. Elements of the Rhenish Massif also act a part of the southern boundary of the plain: the Eifel, Bergisches Land and the Sauerland. In the east the North German Plain spreads out beyond the Harz Mountains and Kyffhäuser further to the south as far as the Central Saxon hill country and the foothills of the Ore Mountains.

A Brocken spectre (British English; American spelling: Brocken specter; German: Brockengespenst), also called Brocken bow, mountain spectre, or spectre of the Brocken is the magnified (and apparently enormous) shadow of an observer cast in mid air upon any type of cloud opposite a strong light source. The figure's head can be surrounded by a bright area called Heiligenschein, or halo-like rings of rainbow-coloured light forming a glory, which appear opposite the Sun's direction when uniformly sized water droplets in clouds refract and backscatter sunlight.

The phenomenon can appear on any misty mountainside, cloud bank, or be seen from an aircraft, but the frequent fogs and low-altitude accessibility of the Brocken, the highest peak of the Harz Mountains in Germany, have created a local legend from which the phenomenon draws its name. The Brocken spectre was observed and described by Johann Silberschlag in 1780, and has often been recorded in literature about the region.