by wbeaty » Sun Nov 13, 2011 7:11 am
> No, iridescent clouds don't jump around that way. They are stable for minutes or longer.
Read the main entry again, I believe you've missed the entire point: the cloud in the videos aren't jumping. The sudden motions in all the various different videos are obviously not motions of clouds. (Especially in
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEiQKOLXU8Y where the bright patch briefly jumps a significant distance in a fraction of a second.)
As mentioned by Vonnegut 1965
http://bit.ly/sXjwYK, only the reflected bright spot jumps, while the distribution of suspended particles remains stable over minutes. This phenomenon turns out to have been reported by eyewitnesses for many decades, and been written up in the literature several times, but only recently do we have some video evidence.
Ah, also I referenced
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110824.html as an example of Pileus: suspended ice crystals above a thunderhead, not necessarily iridescent.
The real question is, why aren't there hundreds of videotaped events like this, rather than just four? One obvious possibility: the bright patch caused by electrically-aligned crystals would only be visible over a fairly small angle, so the sun would have to be at the right height above horizon, and the eyewitnesses would have to be in the right place on the ground relative to the reflective cloud. And of course the cap-cloud would have to contain crystals.
> No, iridescent clouds don't jump around that way. They are stable for minutes or longer.
Read the main entry again, I believe you've missed the entire point: the cloud in the videos aren't jumping. The sudden motions in all the various different videos are obviously not motions of clouds. (Especially in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEiQKOLXU8Y where the bright patch briefly jumps a significant distance in a fraction of a second.)
As mentioned by Vonnegut 1965 http://bit.ly/sXjwYK, only the reflected bright spot jumps, while the distribution of suspended particles remains stable over minutes. This phenomenon turns out to have been reported by eyewitnesses for many decades, and been written up in the literature several times, but only recently do we have some video evidence.
Ah, also I referenced http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110824.html as an example of Pileus: suspended ice crystals above a thunderhead, not necessarily iridescent.
The real question is, why aren't there hundreds of videotaped events like this, rather than just four? One obvious possibility: the bright patch caused by electrically-aligned crystals would only be visible over a fairly small angle, so the sun would have to be at the right height above horizon, and the eyewitnesses would have to be in the right place on the ground relative to the reflective cloud. And of course the cap-cloud would have to contain crystals.