Upside down rainbows and other unusual sights

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Maria
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Re: Upside down rainbows and other unusual sights

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Matthew wrote:

I have been looking at that photo trying to see a skull, but all I see is a hand holding a burrito! Sorry. :lol:

Perhaps. In that second picture, it looks like it contains a skull or the head of Darth Vader, but it is in the eyes of the beholder.

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Maria
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Re: Upside down rainbows and other unusual sights

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POLAR STRATOSPHERIC CLOUDS OVER THE UK: An outbreak of polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs) is underway--but not around the poles. Sky watchers are reporting the beautifully-colored clouds over the UK. David Porter photographed this specimen on Jan. 29th from his home in Turriff, Aberdeenshire:

Image

... Also known as "nacreous" or "mother of pearl" clouds, icy PSCs form in the lower stratosphere when temperatures drop to around minus 85ºC. High-altitude sunlight shining through tiny ice particles 10µm wide produce bright iridescent colors by diffraction and interference. Once thought to be mere curiosities, some PSCs are now known to be associated with the destruction of ozone.

http://www.spaceweather.com/archive.php ... &year=2016

If you live in the Northern latitudes, look at the sky just before sunrise. Maybe you will spot one.

As these become more common, they will be a foreboding of the mini-ice age (a type of Maunder Minimum), which is approaching as the earth cools. Expect more cold weather and more blizzards in 2016 through 2030.

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Matthew
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Re: Upside down rainbows and other unusual sights

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That may be, that there will be an ice-age kind of weather condition... but if you Revelation, the bible clearly teaches that it is not extreme or unusual cold that afflicts an unrepentant world, but HEAT! :oops:

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Maria
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Re: Upside down rainbows and other unusual sights

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Red rainbow

Rainbows are normally red, yellow, green and blue--in short, all the colors of a rainbow. But the towering rainbow Jan Koeman photographed from Kloetinge, the Netherlands, on Feb. 18th was simply red:

Image

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Maria
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Re: Upside down rainbows and other unusual sights

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This over San Francisco.

PYRAMIDS OVER CALIFORNIA: People who pay attention to the daytime sky often notice a luminous ring surrounding the sun. It's called an ice halo, caused by sunlight shining through ice crystals in wispy cirrus clouds. On Feb. 23rd, San Francisco photographer Mila Zinkova looked up and saw not one, but "four wondrous circles around the sun." She quickly moved into the shadow of a totem pole and snapped this picture:

Image

Atmospheric optics expert Les Cowley explains: "These are magnificent and rare displays of pyramidal crystal halos. Ordinary halos are made by six-sided column- or plate-shaped crystals in high and cold cirrus clouds. Over California their ends were capped with pyramids. The pyramids always have fixed angles set by planes of atoms in the ice. Light passing through them form 'odd radius halos' 9, 18, 20, 23, 24 and 35 degrees from the sun. On Mila's image I can see a bright 9 degree ring, an 18 degree one and then a clump of twenty-something radius halos."

http://www.spaceweather.com/archive.php ... &year=2016

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Maria
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Inspiration for Van Gogh's Starry Night

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Image

These clouds, sometimes called "billow clouds," are produced by the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability when horizontal layers of air brush by one another at different velocities. It is widely believed that these waves in the sky inspired the swirls in van Gogh's masterpiece The Starry Night.

The delicate pastel colors of the waves come from irridescence--the diffraction of sunlight by tiny water droplets in the clouds. As the sun set, the colors faded to gray, returning Lowenstein to his porch in Zimbabwe.

http://www.spaceweather.com/archive.php ... &year=2016

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Barbara
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Re: Upside down rainbows and other unusual sights

Post by Barbara »

That's absolutely beautiful ! I love the pastel shades. It does look like Van Gogh's famous piece of art.

The earlier image of the 4 rings around the San Francisco sun is unusual. Glad that photographer was able to make the phenomenon visible for us viewers. Often photos of such events don't turn out as spectacular as the original scene.
This image captures the halos quite well.

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