Circumzenithal Arcs

[Starflyer]

Here's a few pics taken last Sunday afternoon. I'd seen part of a circumhorizontal arc in the past but this blew me away

It started about 16:30 with a small part of a circumhorizontal arc, then both circumzenithal and circumhorizontal arcs, but both were quite faint. Then the circumzenithal arc lit up with the most vibrant colours, and stayed like that for about 15 minutes - a great experience

[Dave Smith]

Very nice. I like the last one especially.

Dave

[dogfish]

Hi Ian

Don't normally see you posting on this board but that is really cool!

Cheers, bro

[lunator]

Ian

great pics that must have been a fantastic sight

Cheers

Ian

[Beyond_Vision]

That must have been a beautiful sight Ian. Not see one myself yet

Regards

Kevin

[Psychobilly]

Love the intensity of the colours in the later shots Ian they are all crackers

Peter...

[PeterW]

Yep, lovely show, caught them when I was comming home on the bus through west london. Parhelia (sundogs) got me looking.... got some of the parhelic circle, a bit of 22degree halo, a quick view of the upper tangential arc and finally (as you have shown) the circumzenithal arc (a happy rainbow smile in the sky), I showed my 3yr old son... he liked it too. These are reckoned to be much more common than rainbows.... but you have to look UP to see them. check out Atmospheric Optics for lots more information and photos.-

Cheers

PEterW

[LukeSkywatcher]

Is this the same as a Solar Halo?

A couple of yrs ago i saw a halo at about 2pm that almost went around the whole sun. There was thin cloud and apart from a couple of breaks in the cloud the halo completely went around the sun and was very vivid in colour as above. It was really something to see.

[Starflyer]

Thanks for the kind comments

I don't know a great deal about these arcs and had to google them to get the correct names. It was a fantastic afternoon and the show lasted a good hour with arcs of various intensity, position and size visible almost all of the time.

The arcs were forming in the high wispy cloud but seemed to be intensified when thick, low level patchy clouds passed in front of the sun. I'll definitely look out for them when I next see the same combination of cloud formation.

Cheers,

Ian

[Tim]

Wow! Great shots

[Ant]

They are great - personally I think rarer than rainbows... I do spend a lot of time looking up

Anyhow, that last image is spectacular. Way better than the Arc's that I've seen (all one of them)!

Check out Sundogs, Sun Dogs, Parhelia, Mock Suns for explanations on how they form and images etc...

Ant

[jgs001]

They're great Ian, very well captured.