Ring Around The Moon

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Keeping with the theme of halos in the sky, this time a beautiful halo appeared around the Moon tonight.  Just like the halos around the Sun, it is caused by ice crystals in the high altitude cirrus clouds.  These type of clouds normally precede a warm front by one or two days.  Warm fronts means storms.  A common belief is that the number of stars within a Moon halo indicate the number of days before bad weather.  I see two or three stars in the image.  I don't think the "number of stars legend" is true, but warm fronts and cold fronts usually do precede storms.  Right now here in the Kansas City area we have a warm front to the west of us creating the cirrus clouds, but according to the weather forecasts, storms will slip right by us to the south.  I guess in a few days we'll see who is right, the weather forecasters or the urban legend.

More Atmospheric Phenomenon

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Good friend Scott Kranz sent me this wonderful picture of a very nice Halo, Sundog and Tangent Arc.  The halo is usually a complete circle around the Sun.  The sundog is connected to the halo on the right side (just above the roof) and the tangent arc is at the top of the halo.  The tangent arc is "gull wing" shaped and everything is created by the play of sunlight on ice crystals.  Along with the atmospheric phenomenon, Scott captured some really nice high cirrus clouds shaped into arcs by the wind.  He took the picture a couple of weeks ago while vacationing with his family at Disney World in Florida.  To see a computer simulation of the various halos and arcs go here: http://www.atoptics.co.uk/halosim.htm then browse the fantastic images throughout this website.

Diamond Dust Sundogs

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Coming home from grocery shopping last evening I spotted sundogs on each side of the setting sun.  Also called "mock suns" the scientific name is parahelia.  Sundogs appear as colored patches of light 22 degrees on each side of the sun and are formed by ice crystals in very cold high cirrus clouds or from "diamond dust" crystals drifting in the air at low levels.  This was probably diamond dust because the wind was blowing the fine particles of snow into the air.  The temperature was about 7 degrees Farenheit.

Also notice the dark beam shooting out of the left side of sun.  This is another atomospheric phenomenon called a crepuscualr ray, which is just a shadow of the cloud near the sun's position.

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About a month ago, my nephew, Ambrose Solis, captured this bright sundog with his camera phone in Colorado.  This one was definitely caused by ice crystals in the high cirrus clouds.

Sometimes sundogs are accompanied by various arcs and halos, also caused by ice crystals.  Be on the look out for sky phenomon such as these.  They even occur in the Summer time and can easily be photographed with the simplest camera.

Sun, Moon and Venus Pillars

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Beams of light like you see above are created by light shining through millions of ice crystals in the atmosphere. A great website http://www.atoptics.co.uk/halo/platpill.htm explains how this works. The above picture was taken January 5, 2002, six years ago. What reminded me of this picture was another one on Spaceweather.com but instead of sunlight creating the pillar, they were caused by streetlights. The neat thing about these is curved arcs at the top of the pillar. Something new and mysterious: http://spaceweather.com/archive.php?month=01&day=01&year=2009&view=view

Pillars can also be created by moonlight and even the planet Venus. I was looking at some pictures of these when I suddenly realized I had taken some myself and I didn't realize it until now. Take a look at the closeup picture of the Moon and Venus image from my blog of December 24 below. Click on the image to make it larger and you will see small pillars extending both above and below the Moon and Venus. I can't believe I missed these.

I have seen pillars coming off streetlights while driving my car, so be on the lookout for this cool weather phenomenon.