Big circle around the Moon

Two days before in Chennai, we were able to see a big circle around the moon, and it become the talk of the city. I managed to take a snap of the sky with the moon and the circle. But the circle is cut at the top and the bottom. And when I saw the snap in my camera, the circle was visible. But when I put that in my laptop, I am not able to see anything. So I used photoshop to change the color, brightness properties to show the circle very slightly. The next morning, newspaper THE HINDU had the snapshot which is really good (of course they have a better camera than me, lol).

The ring is caused by conditions that are similar to appearance of rainbow. The rainbow is formed when light from sun passes through water droplets in the atmosphere and are split into colors like when a light passes through a prism. These rays are reflected from the other side of the droplet and what we see is the rainbow. Similarly here the circle is formed by refraction of moon light (light from sun reflected by moon) from ice crystals in the atmosphere.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good article

Anonymous said...

u r genious.............

Anonymous said...

This also happened 11-10-08, it was kind of weird. I couldnt find nothing online except for this. Thanks. :D

Anonymous said...

Same here in Jönköping Sweden today, it is beautiful!

Anonymous said...

just saw it early this morning 222am in Flint Michigan

Anonymous said...

omg it looked freaky at first but now it looks beautiful :) it happened today 11.30.09 :)

Anonymous said...

Was like that Dec. 29, 2009 in Pensacola, Florida, USA

Siddharth Jain said...

Same thing happened on Feb 23, 2010. Is there a scientific name for this circle? I poetically felt like calling it a ripple in the sky.

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Please one more post about that.I wonder how you got so good. This is really a fascinating blog, lots of stuff that I can get into. One thing I just want to say is that your Blog is so perfect

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