Wednesday 1 July 2020

A Natural Phenomenon,

which apparently is very common,


  in some parts of the world, like the United States, where it can be seen several times each summer in any one place, and very rare in others, like in northern Europe, that I have never heard of before, photographs weathernews,

 it is commonly known as a “fire rainbow” as it often looks like a multicolored flame in the sky, because of the shape of the fragmentary cirrus clouds it form in, this sky attraction is actually a circumhorizontal arc, 

 described as a ‘rainbow cloud’ this one was recently spotted above Tokyo and pictures of it went viral on social media, on June 26th, reports of an iridescent cloud visible above Tokyo started being shared on Twitter, and soon, photos of the intriguing phenomenon made their way to the popular social media platform as well. It was as the rumors described, a multicolored cloud that oddly resembled a rainbow, only in reality this optical phenomenon was closer to an ice halo than a rainbow,

“Apart from the presence of ice-containing clouds in the right position in the sky, the halo requires that the light source (Sun or Moon) be very high in the sky, at an elevation of 58° or greater,” Wikipedia explains. “This means that the solar variety of the halo is impossible to see at locations north of 55°N or south of 55°S. A lunar circumhorizon arc might be visible at other latitudes, but is much rarer since it requires a nearly full Moon to produce enough light.” as in most posts I make that I am not familiar with, I have a read about the back ground to it, and found out that this natural phenomena has been seen in the UK before in this BBC post in June 2019, I had no knowledge of this phenomenon, it just goes to show I should get out more!


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