by APOD Robot » Wed Oct 29, 2014 4:08 am
Iridescent Cloud Edge Over Colorado
Explanation: Sometimes your eclipse viewing goes bad in an interesting way. While watching and photographing
last Thursday's
partial solar eclipse, a
popular astronomy blogger suffered through long periods of
clouds blocking the Sun. Unexpectedly, however, a nearby cloud began to show a rare effect:
iridescence. Frequently part of a more familiar solar
corona effect,
iridescence is the diffraction of sunlight around a thin screen of
nearly uniformly-sized water droplets.
Different colors of the sunlight become deflected by slightly
different angles and so come to the observer from slightly different directions. This display,
featured here, was quite bright and exhibited an unusually broad range of colors. On the right, the
contrails of an airplane are also visible.
[/b]
[url=http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap141029.html][img]http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/calendar/S_141029.jpg[/img] [size=150]Iridescent Cloud Edge Over Colorado[/size][/url]
[b] Explanation: [/b] Sometimes your eclipse viewing goes bad in an interesting way. While watching and photographing [url=http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=34008]last Thursday[/url]'s [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_October_23,_2014]partial solar eclipse[/url], a [url=http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap030923.html]popular astronomy blogger[/url] suffered through long periods of [url=http://www.nasa.gov/flash/57067main_clouds.swf]clouds[/url] blocking the Sun. Unexpectedly, however, a nearby cloud began to show a rare effect: [url=http://www.atoptics.co.uk/droplets/irid1.htm]iridescence[/url]. Frequently part of a more familiar solar [url=http://www.atoptics.co.uk/droplets/corona.htm]corona[/url] effect, [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_iridescence]iridescence[/url] is the diffraction of sunlight around a thin screen of [url=http://www.atoptics.co.uk/droplets/cordrsz.htm]nearly uniformly-sized[/url] water droplets. [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqgdJsJ_Rdw]Different colors[/url] of the sunlight become deflected by slightly [url=http://www.atoptics.co.uk/droplets/cormoon.htm]different angles[/url] and so come to the observer from slightly different directions. This display, [url=http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/10/26/iridescent_clouds_eclipse_photo_led_something_even_better.html]featured here[/url], was quite bright and exhibited an unusually broad range of colors. On the right, the [url=http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap041013.html]contrails[/url] of an airplane are also visible.
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