A scientist recently snapped a series of shining arcs and halos of sunshine surrounding the sun within the sky above the U.K., including an exceptionally rare ring of sunshine that circled your entire sky.
Alan Fitzsimmons, an astronomer at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland, captured the weird light show above Belfast’s Botanic Gardens on May 28. The display lasted around half-hour, Fitzsimmons told Live Science.
A number of the bizarre glowing rays were also spotted across other parts of Northern Ireland, in addition to in northern England and Scotland, in keeping with Spaceweather.com.
The arcs and halos are brought on by hundreds of thousands of tiny, perfectly positioned ice crystals within the upper Earth atmosphere, which frequently accompany thin cirrus clouds, Fitzsimmons said. “If the winds are very uniform up there, the hexagonal-shaped crystals align,” he added. “This permits the daylight refracting through them to mix, just as light refracts through a prism, producing arcs and circles of sunlight.”
Fitzsimmons’ image includes no less than three different confirmed optical phenomena: a 22-degree halo, the massive circle surrounding the sun; a pair of “sundogs,” the brilliant points on both sides of the 22-degree halo; and a whole parhelic circle, the road that bisects the circle, which also forms a full circle around your entire sky.
A full parhelic circle may be very rare since it requires no less than five internal reflections from hundreds of thousands of individual ice crystals, all catching sunbeams concurrently, in keeping with Spaceweather.com.
The photographs also may include features of a circumscribed halo and a supralateral arc, which form the “eyelids” above and below the 22-degree halo, in keeping with Spaceweather.com.
The parhelic circle is the rarest and most “impressive feature” within the image, Fitzsimmons said. It’s something he has seen only a few times before, he added. But the opposite phenomena are more common than most individuals realize.
“The sun may be quite brilliant after they [the phenomena] are visible, so to note them, you want to block out the sun together with your thumb or a tree,” Fitzsimmons said. “But anytime it’s sunny with high-altitude wispy clouds, it’s value looking to see if there’s a halo or perhaps something more.”
On May 30, a photographer in Finland also caught a shot of a rainbow-colored ring of sunshine, referred to as a pollen corona, surrounding the sun. These rings, that are created by light scattering off of pollen grains within the air, are also hard to identify unless a part of the sun’s light has been blocked out.
Tiny atmospheric ice crystals may also create a variety of other weird visual phenomena, resembling polar stratospheric clouds, which shine like rainbows within the Arctic, and night-shining clouds (also called noctilucent clouds), which can develop into more visible to people within the Northern Hemisphere during June and July.
