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A perfect rainbow circle around the sun. Excuse the bad photo, I almost blinded myself.
It’s a phenomenon know as a halo (for obvious reasons) or a nimbus, icebow or gloriole. Today’s show in the skies over Johannesburg looks like a 22° halo specifically. It forms as sunlight is refracted in hexagonal ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere. Traditional belief has it that the halo is a harbinger of rain to come later.
If you see swallows flying through it then, I guess that would mean lots of rain is on the way?
5 Comments
Hope you don’t mind that I added a little more info to your post Cindy? It needed a little more text so that I could put it onto the feature scroller on the front page.
It’s a very freaky think, isn’t it? Mind you, the Wikipedia info says it happens up to 100 times a year. Must be in other parts of the world or on cloudy days here, because I can’t remember seeing one so clearly before.
It was also going to be my Friday Photo this week…
You could trash this post, it’s a lousy pic … the vertical line is there because my daughter set my camera to video
I ain’t trashing no posts. Just saying like that I am going to like do the picture of the sun too also like okay?
Nice having young ones around the place to blame for our technical mishaps.
LOL, it is nice
Nice picture (despite the weird video line through it). We get these halo things occassionally here in the UK as well, but like you say, with so many cloudy days we hardly ever see them.
Looking forward to your picture of the event Greg.
[...] I mentioned in my comments on Monday, the subject of my Friday Photo today is the halo that formed around the sun. The phenomenon was [...]