Iridescent Cloud Edge Over Colorado
Explanation:
Sometimes your eclipse viewing goes bad in an interesting way.
While watching and photographing
last Thursday's
partial solar eclipse, a
popular astronomy blogger
suffered through long periods of
clouds blocking the Sun.
Unexpectedly, however, a nearby cloud began to show a rare effect:
iridescence.
Frequently part of a more familiar solar
corona effect,
iridescence
is the diffraction of sunlight around a thin screen of
nearly uniformly-sized
water droplets.
Different colors
of the sunlight become deflected by slightly
different angles
and so come to the observer from slightly different directions.
This display,
featured here, was quite bright and exhibited an unusually broad range of colors.
On the right, the
contrails of an airplane are also visible.
APOD Wall Calendar:
Weather and Volcanoes
Authors & editors:
Robert Nemiroff
(MTU) &
Jerry Bonnell
(USRA)
NASA Web Site Statements, Warnings,
and Disclaimers
NASA Official: Jay Norris.
Specific
rights apply.
A service of:
LHEA at
NASA /
GSFC
& Michigan Tech. U.
