This morning I was driving to the post office to drop a package off and noticed a halo around the sun. I’ve seen these before but I never have actually captured any on “film” until today. I’ve taken to carrying my camera with me wherever I go which is really fun because when these types of events happen I’m there like Jimmy Olsen on a Superman sighting.
Here are the three photos I took this morning. I enhanced the first one to better demonstrate the beauty of the rainbow effect that accompanies this phenomenon.
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The name of this fantastic sight varies. They are simply called ‘halos‘. Some people refer to them as Icebows and yet others call it an ice-halo. Their names are all appropriate. This optical effect is caused by ice crystals in very cold cirrus clouds located in the upper troposphere. The light refracting off of these clouds creates the effect. Sometimes the halo is accompanied by Sun Dogs (also know as parhelia). Sun Dogs are bright pillars or splotches of light that appear on either side of the sun. I did not see any this morning–but this was still cool.
Way cool. for some reason my browser didn’t show the image but I managed to find the link directly from the source and was able to bring it up that way. but yeah, really cool pic! you should submit the first one to the astro pic of the day. 🙂
It’s been excellent weather for these lately. I saw a really spectacular halo and pair of sundogs in the late afternoon on the 21st driving through Wisconsin on the way back from Chicago.
I noticed this too and was sad I didn’t have a camera handy – nice job catching it on film 🙂
Works in Firefox and IE here. Astro pic? Is this considered Astronomy related? I suppose the sun is probably the focal point of our astronomical universe. 😉 I didn’t see anywhere to submit it when I looked.
Just installed FF2 and they come up fine here too.
Hey, that’s a really cool effect! I’ve never seen one that obvious before. Great job on the pic, Mr. Madaracs! =)
Same incredible thing happen to our town in Medan
A perfect rainbow ring around the sun appeared at noon on 22 Sep 2008, we believe also known as Sun Dogs
You might be interested to see the photos we took below:
http://www.medanku.com/rainbow-halo-sun/
Warmest Greetings from
MedanKu.com
I am in Killeen, Texas. It is 11:54 a.m. on Thursday, the 22nd of January. It is really amazing right now. The sun is huge. The halo looks like a rainbow around it. I guess it is the ice crystals magnifying the heat but I had to stay in the shade. The heat was bad on my skin. It was difficult to look at because of the size and brightness. The sun looked almost white. We found your page trying to find out what had happened. It’s beautiful. Thank you for the pictures on here.
Glad this page is still getting hits and thanks for looking. It is neat when it happens. I also recently captured a reflection on the clouds produced from the sun hitting the airplane and reflecting onto the clouds. I’ll probably post that when I have some time in the next couple of days.