The Good Life... a weblog about life, technology, and the Opera Web browser

Fire drills are great!

Tonight, there was a gigantic rainbow halo around the moon. I did my best to take a picture of it--err, actually I took ten pictures of it, but I doubt any will come out. Fortunately, someone with a lot more skill and much better equipment managed to capture a similar moon halo in San Sebastian, Spain in March 2000.

According to the NASA site where the picture is hosted, this phenomenon occurs when high thin clouds containing millions of tiny ice crystals cover much of the sky. Each ice crystal acts like a miniature lens. Because most of the crystals have a similar elongated hexagonal shape, light entering one crystal face and exiting through the opposing face refracts 22 degrees, which corresponds to the radius of the Moon Halo. A similar Sun Halo may be visible during the day.