Glory, Glory Halo-Rainbow!
There have been a number of recent, excellent atmospheric optics additions to our Photo Gallery. For more on these phenomena, visit the excellent Atmospheric Optics website. Check out their "What's New" section for August 2007 to see something I didn't even think was possible... multiple rainbows! For larger versions of the photos, click on them to view our Photo Gallery.
Just this morning, zobo (who also caught waves from Hurricane Dean in Aruba) submitted a pic of an unusually low rainbow, taken back in May:
Low rainbows are typically caught around noon, when the sun angle calculations dictate that the bow will be across the horizon. Rainbows are usually sighted in the evening when they are higher in the sky. You can read more about low rainbows and the angle calculations on the AO site.
And last week, photographer Raligard shared this photo taken in 2005:
He explains: "This picture was taken shortly after takeoff from the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. The angle of the Dash 7 aircraft and distance to the moisture rich clouds below caused the sun to cast this uncommon shadow and halo pattern on the clouds. This phenomena called an airplane glory can be observed from most aircraft where there is clear bright sun above and moisture rich clouds below when the aircraft is within a few hundred meters of the cloud tops."
Last week user thejah uploaded these photos of a 22-degree halo and additional arc from July in New Jersey, taken with his cell phone camera.
This reminds me of a similar photo that I snapped in 2006 right outside of AccuWeather HQ. Proving that halos appear on fair weather days when you don't have your camera, I took this photo with a poor disposable camera that got developed even more poorly (yech!)
It was never clear to me whether this arc that I saw was a rare circumhorizontal arc - or a supralateral arc... I would guess the latter. You can read more about both on the AO site here.
In early August, photographer BeckyMarie snapped this photo of a Sun Dog over Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Sun Dogs are probably the most common type of ice halo (the clouds are high, therefore cold and are actually ice crystals; the sun shines through them like a prism).
And last but not least, tedyo uploaded this photo on August 30th, though it was taken earlier in June, over Manchester, United Kingdom. Because this was taken from a plane, and not the ground, I can't say which kind of rainbow it was, but I would label it a rainbow.
