Ice Crystal Halos

Not everything that is apparently a circumhorizontal arc is really one. I saw this halo on 8 July 2009 on Mount Spitzstein (1596m) at the German-Austrian Border. Besides a complete circumscribed halo, a reddish brightening appeared in the CHA-area. I…

MMT Observatory in Arizona has an automatic all sky camera that records the sky day and night. Archived videos are available from 2006 ( 1 ). Halos are visible in these recordings (although many displays are lost to the overexposure).…

An avid atmospheric optics photographer, Pitan Singhasaneh has recently started experimenting with time lapse halo photography. Even though the displays are not special, the cloud movement and changes in halos create its own kind of magic. Pitan’s videos are available…

On 8 August, I was flying from Barcelona to Hungary, when I saw a faint pillar of ice crystals glistening close to me outside the window, at right angle to it. The pillar was white and the crystals were so…

This minor odd radius came with a surprise after stacking. Outside the 18° halo / plate arc there seems to be a faint, but rather well defined 20° column arc. As there is no sign of 9° stuff, crystals had…

On 14 July Patrik Trncak from the Czech Republic observed a display with a coloured parhelic circle ( 1 ). The spectral colours were visible opposite the sun. Besides the more usual halos, the display also showed possible Lowitz arcs…

First Panu Lahtinen thought he had seen the 120 deg sub-parhelia, but after consulting Jarmo Moilanen, who noticed the shadow of the airplane, the halo was identified to be “only” a sub-anthelion with a short sub-parhelic circle attached to it.…

This display was observed on 1 July 2009 in Tampere, Finland. The most prominent features were the bright upper tangent arc (contributing to a partial circumscribed halo) and the parhelic circle. A faint Wegener arc can be seen rising above…