28 May 2010

Celestial phenomena

Dawn - about 5.20 am at London's latitude, this time of year. The horse chestnut outside the bedroom window is a delight, this time of year. (In a few weeks it and the "weed trees" that have grown up will make my studio dark, dark, dark...)
At about 7pm, this icy rainbow (also known as a parhelion) to the north - I wanted to stop people in the street and say "look, look", but they all had their own agendas of course, never looking up at the sky -
There's a spectacular photo of an ice rainbow here. These "sundogs" are caused by light passing through high-altitude cirrus clouds that contain plate-shaped hexagonal ice crystals which are facing parallel to the earth’s surface - sort of like a prism.

1 comment:

June said...

Just a note to say that I haven't gotten to your blog often enough, but tonight I got to go back through many earlier entries and found them fascinating. Thanks.