Ice Crystal Halos

Miika Karppinen photographed this display in the town of Kajaani on 8 March this year. Upper sunvex Parry arc and 46° Parry arc are weakly present ( 1 ). The other display occurred on 26 October 2006 in Salla (…

Long absence of rare high cloud halos in Tampere skies was brought to a sudden end by a complex display on 2 May 2008. Singly and Parry oriented columns played the key roles: among the more common halo forms the…

A series of complex halo displays occured in Eastern Europe between 27 March and 6 April. The first display was seen in Vecsés, Hungary (observer: Ágnes Kiricsi). On 27 March, after the appearance of a bright circumscribed halo, a growing…

The publication of the Mars halo on this site stimulates me to dig in history. On 27 April 1975, I saw by change a picture of a subsun taken from space ( 1 ). It is here on the frontal…

Jukka Ruoskanen has scanned his best halo slides ( 1 ). The material spans from year 1988 to 2005 and includes several displays of interest. Some cases are rather puzzling, like the one shown above, photographed on 23 December 2001.…

Dmitry Savvateev observed a subsun in 2006 in the Khibiny Mountains (Kola Peninsula, part of the Murmansk region). This subsun, however, seems to be accompanied by a much rarer halo: Bottlinger’s ring. Even though this case is a marginal one,…

Dmitry Kuznetsov saw this complex display in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk on 1 April 2007. The vertical arrows in the photo denote the Wegener arc and the horizontal arrows point at faint helic arc. Dimitry described also subanthelic arc, but it is located…

The photo above is intended to be food for thought, as it shows a rather controversial phenomenon. Mónika Bodó took this picture on 27 March 2008 between 16:43 – 16:46 on a flight from Athens to Budapest. As an air…

While working on a wood bowl in my workshop I noticed a lot of Altocumulus clouds that were turning into ice crystals. That meant a chance of elliptical halos. I took my camera, went for a walk, looked up and…