Breathtaking: the rainbow over the Washington-Idaho border.
Image: AP.
This blanket of fire, covering hundreds of square miles, is the rarest phenomenon of them all. It was spotted in the USA on the Washington-Idaho border around midday last Saturday.To create a rainbow of fire, clouds must be at least 20,000 ft high and the ice crystals within them align horizontally instead of their usual vertical position. The sun also needs to be at least 58 degrees above the horizon.
Dr Jonathan Fox, of the US National Weather Service in Spokane, Washington, said: 'It was even more spectacular than the Northern Lights. I feel lucky to have seen it because it only forms in very rare situations. This is the first one I've ever seen. It was a breathtaking sight and it hung around for about an hour.'
Added 16 June 2006: a link to interesting comments from Jonathan Fox in response to a reader's query (in comments section, below).
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Wouldn't this actually be a partial halo as opposed to a rainbow? A rainbow appears with the observer's back to the sun, while a halo appears with the observer facing the sun, and rainbows are a liquid water phenomenon while halos are an ice phenomenon. I can't tell where the sun is in this picture, but I assume that the phenomenon is the same as that which forms parhelia. Parhelia occur when the ice crystals are more flat than columnar, and are actually quite common when the sun is near the horizon and there are thin, high clouds. If there is a distribution of plate and column shapes, both parhelia and halos can form, usually with a bright spot at the top of the halo as well as to each side. The most impressive ones can also have a vertical shaft of light centered on the sun. The most impressive instance of parhelia with a near complete halo that I remember occured one late fall day when I happened to be under my house. Everyone else told me how wonderful it was.
Are you sure this pic hasn't been retouched?? Because of its beauty, I blew this up to use as a desktop background and noticed that there were 2 faces in this picture. There is a large one in the middle of the large cloud formation about the middle of the upper part. A smaller one can be seen in the lower left hand corner where the clouds start to fade out.
After posting this, I went searching for other pics of this. This was an article that I found that included pics of fire rainbows. None of the pics are like this photo. Check it out and you decide if this photo was retouched.
Todd Gross New England Weather : Viewer Photos - 'Fire Rainbow'
... arc, commonly known as a Fire Rainbow, was spotted at around 1:40PM ... Read more about the "Fire Rainbow" in this National Geographic News article. ...toddgross.com/todd_gross_new_england_we/2006/08/viewer_photos_f.html - 56k - Cached - More from this site - Save
Wow. That's beautiful. Thanks for posting it.
I was interested in Mistie's comment about seeing faces in the photo. When I looked at the larger version, the face in the middle was very obvious to me, but I couldn't find the other one.
Looking closely at the middle "face" it appears to be just natural streaks of cloud, not something Photoshopped in. There's a word for the human propensity to see faces in coincidental patterns - it's called pareidolia, and it comes from the fact that we're hardwired from birth to identify and respond to a human face. If we were giant sentient lizards, maybe we'd see lizards in everything.
In fact, if you start thinking very hard about lizards (or anything else) and go looking for shapes that look like that, you'll start seeing those in clouds too.
One of my favourite sites, Bad Astronomy, has a great page about pareidolia, describing how Lenin appeared in the author's shower curtain, and Abe Vigoda in the Eagle Nebula. http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/lenin.html