Page 1 of 1
APOD: Iridescent Cloud Edge Over Colorado (2014 Oct 29)
Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2014 4:08 am
by APOD Robot
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]
Re: APOD: Iridescent Cloud Edge Over Colorado (2014 Oct 29)
Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2014 9:20 am
by Boomer12k
What an eerie sight that is....and quite awesome.
:---[===] *
Re: APOD: Iridescent Cloud Edge Over Colorado (2014 Oct 29)
Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2014 11:36 am
by Cousin Ricky
Oh noes! HAARP is now turning the clouds colors!
![Wink :wink:](./images/smilies/icon_wink.gif)
Re: APOD: Iridescent Cloud Edge Over Colorado (2014 Oct 29)
Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2014 3:32 pm
by geckzilla
Cousin Ricky wrote:Oh noes! HAARP is now turning the clouds colors!
![Wink :wink:](./images/smilies/icon_wink.gif)
Haha, don't even joke about this. We'll be knee deep in nuts soon.
Re: APOD: Iridescent Cloud Edge Over Colorado (2014 Oct 29)
Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2014 5:05 pm
by Chris Peterson
Bummer. I'm in Colorado and all I saw was a solar eclipse under cloudless skies...
Re: APOD: Iridescent Cloud Edge Over Colorado (2014 Oct 29)
Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2014 3:22 am
by Nitpicker
Chris Peterson wrote:Bummer. I'm in Colorado and all I saw was a solar eclipse under cloudless skies...
E7_25227p.jpg
Nice image Chris. And is that a tinge of green I sense in your comment?
![Mr. Green :mrgreen:](./images/smilies/icon_mrgreen.gif)
Re: APOD: Iridescent Cloud Edge Over Colorado (2014 Oct 29)
Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2014 2:24 pm
by Chris Peterson
Nitpicker wrote:Nice image Chris. And is that a tinge of green I sense in your comment? :mrgreen:
I'd rather have the real prize than the consolation prize. And I do see iridescent clouds a few times a year. Still, I'm glad that Phil was able to turn lemons into lemonade.
I got eclipse viewing filters for all the kids at the school, and we invited the community, too. About 100 kids and adults viewing the Sun, followed by a spaghetti dinner and then I opened the school's observatory for some nighttime viewing. An all round astronomically successful day in the mountains.
Re: APOD: Iridescent Cloud Edge Over Colorado (2014 Oct 29)
Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2014 3:04 pm
by RJN
Hey Phil Plait mentioned this APOD -- and his cool image featured in it -- in his blog on Slate:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronom ... photo.html
- RJN