Starship Asterisk*

Last Thursday (8-6-09) I was flying East out of Pheonix at about 7 pm. About twenty minutes into our flight, the sun set over the desert from a nearly cloudless western sky. Moments after the sun dropped completely below the horizon, an enormous horizontal rainbow appeared. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet were all clearly visible rising up from the horizon.

My assumption is that the light was being scattered through different thicknesses of atmosphere, emphasizing different wavelengths. But even if that wasn't the case, this is easily one of the most amazing things I have ever seen.

Regretably, I didn't get my camera out to take any pictures, since I figured it would be gone quickly, which it was.

Has anyone ever seen or heard of anything like this before?

gbroge wrote:Last Thursday (8-6-09) I was flying East out of Pheonix at about 7 pm. About twenty minutes into our flight, the sun set over the desert from a nearly cloudless western sky. Moments after the sun dropped completely below the horizon, an enormous horizontal rainbow appeared. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet were all clearly visible rising up from the horizon.

My assumption is that the light was being scattered through different thicknesses of atmosphere, emphasizing different wavelengths. But even if that wasn't the case, this is easily one of the most amazing things I have ever seen.

Regretably, I didn't get my camera out to take any pictures, since I figured it would be gone quickly, which it was.

Has anyone ever seen or heard of anything like this before?

http://asterisk.apod.com/vie ... =9&t=16850

G'day gbroage

Thats amazing my wife explained to me the same type of rainbow just a day ago.

All the colors were shown. Just as the Sun set below the horizon.

G'day Makc

My wife wants to thank you for the link on Rainbows.

It's a girl thing.

neufer wrote: http://asterisk.apod.com/vie ... =9&t=16850

I don't think it could be a circumhorizon(tal) arc. Maybe an upper tangent arc???

gbroge wrote:Last Thursday (8-6-09) I was flying East out of Pheonix at about 7 pm. About twenty minutes into our flight, the sun set over the desert from a nearly cloudless western sky. Moments after the sun dropped completely below the horizon, an enormous horizontal rainbow appeared. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet were all clearly visible rising up from the horizon.

Wikipedia: Circumhorizontal Arc wrote:A circumhorizontal arc (properly a circumhorizon arc and never the recent uninformed and misleading term 'fire rainbow') is an optical phenomenon. It is not a rainbow, it is an ice-halo formed by ice crystals in high level cirrus clouds.
...
For the halo to form the sun must be very high in the sky, at an elevation of 58° or more.

Wikipedia: Upper Tangent Arc wrote:An upper tangent arc is a halo, an atmospheric optical phenomenon which appears over and tangent to the 22° halo around the sun.
...
Like many other halos, upper tangent arcs grade from a red inner edge to a blue outer edge because red light is refracted more strongly than blue light.

I agree. It wasn't arc shaped at all, and it wasn't in any clouds either.

Of the (cough) google images, the only one that was close to what I saw was this one:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_7b7BOyDKFTQ/S ... CT0018.JPG

Which, as the author explains, doesn't quite justify what he saw.

Oh, that's not a rainbow. That's just the sunlight blending into the blue atmosphere and then eventually to the indigo blue and blackness of space. You must have saw it when it was really compact right before setting. I used to see that all the time when I lived in a place with a clear skyline. The red and yellow come from the atmosphere taking all the blue out of the light and in between blue and yellow you get a dirty green. Ok, well that's my extremely unscientific explanation. When I was a child I lived in a rural area in southern California on the side of a large, rocky hill. That house had such a great view of the sky. It was also very dry. I seem to remember being able to watch them on a near daily basis. ... memory for those years is getting old and fallible, though, so I could have just made all of that up. One thing is for sure though. They are very beautiful and mesmerizing.

Being at sunset and at altitude in the desert, it could be an upper atmospheric condition related to the Belt of Venus (or this APOD ) and the high desert atmosphere and the local Phoenix Area Smog near nightfall

gbroge wrote:My assumption is that the light was being scattered through different thicknesses of atmosphere, emphasizing different wavelengths. But even if that wasn't the case, this is easily one of the most amazing things I have ever seen.

I've seen what I think you're describing up here in Ontario, Canada a few times. I'm pretty sure it's just what you've suggested here, atmospheric conditions being just so, to give a rather rainbow-like sunset.

harry wrote:G'day Makc.

wow look who's back! got bored on space.com?

G'day MakC

You know I did not leave, I come here every day reading.

Just that I do not want to cause conflict amongst your people.

So! I'm relaxing.

Oh! You have overseen where I go.

"Spies like us"

Space.com is OK, I also go to other Forums for different topics.

I noticed Nereid , Chris and a few others.

I guess the term "rainbow" might be a bit misleading. What I saw wasn't caused by light reflecting and refracting in raindrops. It was a multicolored array including all the colors found in a rainbow. Which leads me to point out that the picture that I put a link to really doesn't depict what I saw, since there is no "rainbow" present.

Was it anything like the last picture on this person's blog entry?

I believe that last picture is oversaturated, but maybe it's good to reproduce what it felt like watching.

gbroge wrote:I guess the term "rainbow" might be a bit misleading. What I saw wasn't caused by light reflecting and refracting in raindrops. It was a multicolored array including all the colors found in a rainbow. Which leads me to point out that the picture that I put a link to really doesn't depict what I saw, since there is no "rainbow" present.

• Bow , [OE. bowen, bogen, bugen, AS. būgan (generally v.i.); akin to D. buigen, OHG. biogan, G. biegen, beugen, Icel. boginn bent, beygja to bend, Sw. böja, Dan. böie, bugne, Coth. biugan; also to L. fugere to flee, Gr. , and Skr. bhuj to bend.]
  
  1. To cause to deviate from straightness; to bend; to inflect; to make crooked or curved.
  "We bow things the contrary way, to make them come to their natural straightness." Milton.
  
  2. Anything bent, or in the form of a curve, as the rainbow.

We should name this phenomenon so that no one in the future accidentally calls it a rainbow again. Color spectrum sunset?

G'day

Does it have a rainbow of colours?