Debunked: Chemtrail "Chembows" [Solar Halos]

Mick West

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A recent post on The Ann Arbor News Facebook Page displayed a photo of a solar halo with some other clouds and some aircraft contrails

They included a short explanation of what it was:
Daniel Frei's Photography shared this photo with us of a 'sun dog' that was visible Saturday afternoon. Here's a little explanation from him: The ring is caused by sunlight passing through ice crystals in cirrus clouds within the Earth's atmosphere. Although more common in the spring and fall, this can happen anytime when the northern jet stream descends southward, drawing down Arctic air masses.
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Unfortunately the comments below the photo were quickly overrun by believers in the "chemtrail" theory (and then by other people trying to explain things to them). A few samples:

  • The media is by far the most perverted evil for its continued deseption, These are Chemical trails!, Beware the pitch forks are coming,, and God is watching!
  • Family worked on these military weather mod/manipulation programs for years. That entire picture contains end results of those type programs.
  • This is caused by chemtrails/geoengineering this is not natural.
  • Barium salts could easily mimic ice crystals,what do we find in our rainwater.... Aluminium, Barium, Strontium, arsenic & many other metals, just a coincidence???
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There's two equally important things you need to know about this story:

1) Atmospheric Optical Phenomena such as Halos, Sun-Dogs, "Fire Rainbows", and iridescent clouds" have been seen for thousands of years, and recorded and understood for over a hundred years
2) They can only be made by clouds of ice water.

The Science and History of Halos, etc.

Haloes have been observed since ancient times. Here's a 17th Century painting of some haloes.


And here's a 1957 book showing a halo with some contrails contributing to it:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/metabunk/sets/72157642384424663/

Halos are formed by the refraction of sunlight through billions of tiny ice crystals in the air.

The colors in the halo occur because of refraction. This the bending of light as it goes through a prism. Different wavelengths (colors) of light are bent
different amounts, and this produces the spectrum of colors. We've all see this with the classic triangular prism splitting light.

A hexagonal ice crystal is doing basically the same thing, as it's like a triangular prism with the corners cut off.


The most common form of Halo is the 22° halo, which is the one in the top photo. It's called a 22° halo because of the angle between the sun and the inner edge of the halo. This angle comes about in part because of the angle of the faces in the ice crystals.


http://www.atoptics.co.uk/halo/circ2.htm

Why it can only be water

There are several primary reasons why only water can make these halos.
1) Hexagonal transparent crystals
2) Refractive Index
3) Quantity Required
4) Temporary nature

1) Hexagonal transparent crystals
The 22° Halo requires transparent faces which are at 60° to each other. You can only get this with a triangular or hexagonal crystal structure. Water forms hexagonal shapes naturally. No chemicals form triangular crystals. So we can eliminate any crystal substance that does not have a natural sixfold symmetry, such as common table salt crystals:


We can also eliminate any finely milled substance, which would produce irregular shapes with rough surfaces incapable of refracting light. Here, for example, is a fine dust (nano scale on the right) of Aluminum Oxide:

And here's a more typical milled alumina dust:


We can also eliminate commercially manufactured Alumina power, the purest form of which is known as mono-crystalline aluminum oxide, and looks like:

Or nano sized:

Irregular colored crystal will not make a halo.

We can also eliminate most naturally occurring minerals, as they generally contain impurities that make the crystal either opaque, or they will color or scatter the light, or both.

The crystals would have to be grown on site from a near 100% pure vapor - which of course is trivial to do with water - as it's the natural process of ice cloud (or ice fog) formation. But a lot harder to do with an artificial substance - especially hard to do with aluminum oxide, with a melting point of 3,762°F (2,072°C). And even then, while aluminum oxide does have some hexagonal geometry from some angles, it does not tend to grow into hexagonal shapes.

2) Refractive Index

Ice has a refractive index of of 1.31. Pure Aluminum Oxide crystals (Al2O3, Corundum) has a refractive index of 1.76. The refractive index governs the angle, and so Aluminum Oxide could not make a 22° Halo, because it would refract light at the wrong angle.

http://www.micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/prismsandbeamsplitters/equilateralprism/

The amount of light deviation by a prism is a function of the incident angle, the prism apex (top) angle, and the refractive index of the material from which the prism is constructed. As prism refractive index values are increased, so is the deviation angle of light passing through the prism.
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So if the halo is standard sized, then it's either water, or something with the same refractive index as (frozen) water.

3) Quantity Required

Clouds weigh quite a lot, even though they are not very dense, they are very big. Halos essentially form in a fog of cirrus. Cirrus clouds have about 0.03 g/m3 (grams per cubic meter) of water in them. Let's call that 0.01 for a fine ice haze. Now a 22 degree halo extends out a bit from the 22 degree, say 30 degrees. It' generally some around 12 km up, and the sun around 45 degree. This gives an actual circle of ice fog (12*tan(30)) = 7 km radius (being very rough with the geometry here). A thin layer of cloud would be 100m. So that 3.14*7000*7000*100 = 15386000000 cubic meters of ice fog. Multiply that by 0.03 gives 461580000g, or 461 metric tons.

And that's just if we've somehow just managed to weave the crystals into a small thin patch of sky directly in front of the sun. In the more normal case, the sky is covered with cirrus haze (say 50 km in each direction, which has a thickness of 1km or more. The amount of crystal needed to create such an cirrus overcast is over 200,000 metric tons. This is simply not possible to do with something like aluminum oxide.

So how is it possible with contrails? A typical plane creates 100-300 metric tons of water from the fuel. Yet an full sky overcast can occur with just a handful of planes. Where is the extra water coming from? The answer is it comes from the atmosphere. The air is at 70% relative humidity, meaning it's already holding millions of tons of water. The addition of the small amount of water from the engine pushes the relative humidity briefly over 100%, allowing the water to condense out in tiny drops, which then freeze. The ice crystals continue to grow from the atmospheric water, adding up to 1,000x their original weight.

That's simply impossible to duplicate by spraying a crystal powder. all you have is the original crystal, and that's nowhere near enough to cover the sky. A handful of planes would end up 1/1000th the optical density of the equivalent contrail-induced cirrus.

4) Temporary nature

Let's say you did somehow manage to loft up 200,000 metric tons of nano-manufactured perfect aluminum-oxide crystals, and ignoring the problems with geometry, and refractive index. Then the next problem is the temporary nature of solar halos. Sometimes they just last for a few minutes or hours. They are there one day, and almost always gone the next, and usually gone much sooner. Where does the overcast go?

The obvious answer with a cirrus haze is that it evaporates (technically it "sublimes", turning from solid back to water vapour). It does this quite naturally as the air heats up, or as the ice crystals grow large enough to slowly sink into slightly warmer air. It basically just fades away.

But if some other substance were being sprayed, then where does it go? How can it vanish in a few hours? Of course it can't. Water can vanish because it's basically being re-absorbed back into the atmosphere as water vapor. But a powder of aluminum oxide isn't going to vanish. It's just going to stay there, for many days, until it slowly sinks to the earth. But that's not what we see. So it must be water.
 
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I downloaded HaloSim, but have not found how to change the refractive index.

I did come across this interesting "ice analog" which could in theory be sprayed out of planes to make a 22° halo:

http://www.herts.ac.uk/research/str...SRP/ice-scattering/ice-analogue-image-gallery

We have been developing new methods of studying cirrus, making it possible to do light scattering measurements in the laboratory, instead of having to take complex equipment into high-altitude clouds. The methods depend on two new analogues: fine glass fibres with hexagonal cross-section and crystals with shape, size and optical properties closely resembling those of atmospheric ice. Unlike ice these materials exist at room temperature and do not change their shape and size under normal conditions, which makes them much easier to studying than ice.

The hexagonal fibres are made by grinding and polishing optical glass into the shape of thin hexagonal rods and then drawing the rods out at high temperature. Unfortunately the procedure is quite lengthy and laborious if high precision is required. This is certainly the case for the purpose for which the fibres are intended, namely the testing of theoretical models of scattering - see Publications for further details.

Our crystalline analogues are based on fluorosilicates which, like ice, have unusually low refractive index of about 1.31. And like ice the crystals have hexagonal symmetry. They can be grown from aqueous solution using fairly straightforward methods - see Publications. We have produced a variety of ice analogue crystals including simple shapes such as hexagonal columns or plates and more complex ones such as rosettes and aggregates. The crystal habit and size are influenced by the growth conditions - we can obtain predominantly one form of crystal, for example column. On the other hand it is beneficial to encourage crystal shape diversity, so that the huge variety of crystal forms found in cirrus clouds can be represented. In common with cirrus ice, complex ice-analogue crystals often have 3-dimensional spatial structure.
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The discussion there emphasises just how unique the Hexagonal + 1.31 RI is.
A beautiful way in which cirrus clouds manifest themselves is through halos - faint circles, arcs and spots of white or coloured light seen when sunlight or moonlight shines through thin ice-clouds. Cirrus is a nearly unique source of these displays because they are produced by the refraction of light-rays passing through ice crystals. A whole variety of shapes can be observed, with names ranging from the prosaic to the evocative: 22-degree halo, circumzenithal arc, sundogs, sun-pillar and Parry arc. A tangible demonstration that the new ice analogues do indeed resemble real ice was provided in September 2002 - we managed to produce realistic halo displays using the crystals. While laboratory halo simulations have been attempted before, the materials used either did not have the right shape - hexagonal - or had wrong values of the refractive index. The ice analogue crystals developed at the University of Hertfordshire have the correct refractive index for ice (1.31) as well as having hexagonal symmetry.
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I took this photo at Mammoth Mountain, California, Feb 18, 2008.



Occasionally a halo is accompanies by a Corona, which I also observed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_(optical_phenomenon)
In meteorology, a corona is produced by the diffraction of light from either the Sun or the Moon by individual small water droplets and sometimes tiny ice crystals of a cloud or on a foggy glass surface. The corona consists of small number of concentric colored rings around the celestial object and a central bright aureole. The angular size of the corona depends on the diameters of the cloud droplets - small droplets produce large coronae. For the same reason, the corona is clearest when the size of the droplets is most uniform. Coronae differ from haloes in that the latter are formed by refraction (rather than diffraction) from comparatively large rather than small ice crystals. Reddish colors always occupy the outer part of a corona's ring. Corona is essentially anAiry disc caused by the atmosphere.
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The one I saw at Mammoth was rather atypical.

Seriously though, since a corona is a diffraction phenomena (i.e. caused by lots of small particles that scatter light of particular wavelengths) then if something were being sprayed in the sky it would create a corona, not a 22° halo (which requires refraction, and hence transparent crystals).

Because they are usually washed out by the strong light of the sun, Corona's are more frequently visible around the moon, in a layer of clouds. We've all seen something like this:


Solar coronas are more dramatic under more marginal and extreme conditions such as in antarctica, where the clean air scatters the sun less in general which isolates the optical effect of the corona:
http://ajpadilla.wordpress.com/2013/01/29/2013-a-fresh-start/

There are two parts to a solar corona: a central and very bright aureole, and one or more surrounding colored rings (basically circular rainbows). The color in the rings is the result of the scattered light, and it shows up best around the sun when the droplets or ice crystals are very tiny and low in density (when there isn’t much moisture, like when there is a very thin veil of mist in the air). During our time at Castle Rock [Antarctica], this happened towards the end of the day when very thin clouds started forming around us.
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The diameter and spread of a corona depends on the size and size variation of the particles, so you can infer some things about the particles from the nature of the corona. Coronea can even be formed from pollen:

http://www.mysanantonio.com/life/li...-pollen-corona-spectacular-sights-4206774.php

Hill Country juniper pollen recently caused a rare set of colorful rings to appear around the sun. The color version of this image is at www.mysanantonio.com/life/life_columnists/forrest_mims/ Photograph by Forrest M. Mims III.
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[Note: the term "corona" is more frequently used for the "ring of fire" directly visible around the sun during a solar eclipse, or with a solar telescope]
 
Particle size is an important consideration for contrails, clouds, halos, and coronas. If a particle is too small, then diffraction phenomena outweigh refraction phenomena. If it's really small, then it will only be affecting light by Rayleigh scattering, and it's practically invisible:

http://www.google.com/patents/US3517505
In dealing with the problem of reducing the visibility of condensation trails, [... one approach] to the problem is to alter the size of the ice particles thereby reducing the visibility of the trail. This may be accomplished by reduction of the particle size below the visible range which has been found to be on the order of 0.5 micron. Crystals below this size appear as a blue haze rather than a white trail. From any distance this blue haze would be substantially invisible because of the lack of contrast with the atmosphere.
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0.5 microns is 500 nm. So for a corona or halo to be visible, the particles have to be bigger than that - i.e. out of the nano range.
 
A recent post on The Ann Arbor News Facebook Page displayed a photo of a solar halo with some other clouds and some aircraft contrails

They included a short explanation of what it was:

Daniel Frei's Photography shared this photo with us of a 'sun dog' that was visible Saturday afternoon. Here's a little explanation from him: The ring is caused by sunlight passing through ice crystals in cirrus clouds within the Earth's atmosphere. Although more common in the spring and fall, this can happen anytime when the northern jet stream descends southward, drawing down Arctic air masses.
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Unfortunately the comments below the photo were quickly overrun by believers in the "chemtrail" theory (and then by other people trying to explain things to them). A few samples:


Did they (AANews) mislabel it as a sundog? Isnt it just a halo?

http://www.atoptics.co.uk/halo/parhelia.htm
 
Unfortunately the comments below the photo were quickly overrun by believers in the "chemtrail" theory...

This makes me sad...my "heart" hurts, and my eyes leak water...I think they are called "tears". (not "tears"...I didn't tear anything, I teared up...uh oh, this English language in print is fraught with impossibility and misinterpretation, sometimes...).

In espanol a "tear" is lagrima. The verb to "tear" is romper.

 
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Summertime halos are not uncommon either. The Monthly Weather Review would print a list of halo observations every month and there were frequent observations across the country during June/July/August...From Texas to the Dakotas, California to Maine.
 
Summertime halos are not uncommon either. The Monthly Weather Review would print a list of halo observations every month and there were frequent observations across the country during June/July/August...From Texas to the Dakotas, California to Maine.

Thanks for the pointer. See this article, from exactly 100 years ago:
https://www.metabunk.org/sk/mwr-042-07-0436.pdf



Says that in Paris, France, a 22° halo (or at least fragments thereof) is visible 130 days of the year (35%, or roughly one day out of three).

And here:

https://www.metabunk.org/sk/mwr-046-07-0309c.pdf
Halos observed in July 1918
 
Iv have seen quite a few over the past few years and all of the time it was because of persistent contrails .Probably more than 50. Have yet to see one without contrails present .
 
Iv have seen quite a few over the past few years and all of the time it was because of persistent contrails .Probably more than 50. Have yet to see one without contrails present .

Because the conditions that produce the ice crystals (cirrus clouds) which make the halos are also conducive to contrail formation within the same air mass.
 
Here's a halo from reflective glass beads applied to road paint. I guess that counts as a chembow. The halo is more prominent closer to application day.
 

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So the glass beads are crystals too? I would like to see some electron microscope of those little things. I can imagine now I need to see what kind of halo I produce if I spray a mist of "Penta Water" towards the sun? The perfect experiment for a bunk-hunting website! :D
 
I would like to see some electron microscope of those little things.

Yeah, fascinating to me as well, but do not expect that some adherents will be 'convinced' by the science. Meaning, what one cannot hold in one's hand and then contemplate and understand? It is increasingly difficult to explain to someone who hasn't had a FULL level of all the required scientific training.

ETA: As a layperson trying to understand fields of science that I do NOT have expertise in, I nevertheless can grasp at LEAST the basics. Some people cannot.
 
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Here's a halo from reflective glass beads applied to road paint. I guess that counts as a chembow. The halo is more prominent closer to application day.
"Beads" implies spheres, so it sound more like a rainbow type optical effect than a halo.

Rainbows are created by total internal reflection in tiny drops (spheres) of water in rain or clouds (or garden sprinklers)
 
So the glass beads are crystals too? I would like to see some electron microscope of those little things. I can imagine now I need to see what kind of halo I produce if I spray a mist of "Penta Water" towards the sun? The perfect experiment for a bunk-hunting website! :D
You'd have to spray it away from the sun, unless you were somewhere very cold.
 
some info from http://www.atoptics.co.uk/droplets/glorair.htm and from http://spaceweather.com/

HEART-SHAPED CLOUD PHENOMENON: Frequent fliers who look out the window of their planes often see the shadow of the aircraft dipping in and out of clouds below. The interplay of light and shadow with water droplets in the clouds can produce colorful rings of light called "glories." On July 13th, Tony DeFreece saw a glory that was not a colorful ring, but rather a heart:
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about this heart shaped halo or called a Glory

glory_strip.jpg
 
some info from http://www.atoptics.co.uk/droplets/glorair.htm and from http://spaceweather.com/

HEART-SHAPED CLOUD PHENOMENON: Frequent fliers who look out the window of their planes often see the shadow of the aircraft dipping in and out of clouds below. The interplay of light and shadow with water droplets in the clouds can produce colorful rings of light called "glories." On July 13th, Tony DeFreece saw a glory that was not a colorful ring, but rather a heart:
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about this heart shaped halo or called a Glory

glory_strip.jpg

Nice. Here I've increased the color contrast, and added an indicator of the perspective of the underlying clouds to make it more clear how the shape formed:
 
I've seen halos/coronas around the sun/moon countless times over the years and it has always seemed natural to me, but this rainbow caught my attention as I've never seen anything like this before. I took this photo a few weeks ago in Los Angeles. Any info much appreciated and thanks in advance.Rainbow Cloud.JPG
 
I've seen halos/coronas around the sun/moon countless times over the years and it has always seemed natural to me, but this rainbow caught my attention as I've never seen anything like this before. I took this photo a few weeks ago in Los Angeles. Any info much appreciated and thanks in advance.Rainbow Cloud.JPG

Probably, this is (a part of) the circumhorizontal arc (a.k.a., circumhorizon arc).
The misleading term "fire rainbow" is sometimes used to describe this phenomenon, although it is neither a rainbow, nor related in any way to fire.
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This is an old thread, but I thought I would add these for the record: An exchange of letters in The Times (UK) from August 1944, showing that people have been observing haloes associated with aircraft contrails for over 70 years:

upload_2014-10-14_18-42-23.png
upload_2014-10-14_18-40-0.png
upload_2014-10-14_18-47-48.png
upload_2014-10-14_18-45-39.png

That should be no surprise, as contrails are cirriform clouds that are ideal for halo formation.
 
Can you show how these can be confirmed online or microfiche? The reason why I ask is that so often the believers will try to assert these records are made up.
 
Can you show how these can be confirmed online or microfiche? The reason why I ask is that so often the believers will try to assert these records are made up.
Well, I have a paid subscription to the Gale database which includes The Times.There's no free online access. But public libraries ought to have them on microfiche.

Those are all from the letters page, and all from August 1944. I don't think I made a note of the publication dates (I took those screenshots some time ago when I posted them in the pre-1995 contrails thread) but they'd probably be within two or three days of the dates of each letter. They'd be easy to find in a library.


Edit: info on the Times Digital Archive here: http://gale.cengage.co.uk/times-digital-archive/times-digital-archive-17852006.aspx

I imagine quite a few big city or university libraries in the USA would have a subscription.
 
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Incidentally, a little biographical snippet... I've just been doing a bit of digging and I'm pretty certain that the U. V. Bogaerde who wrote that first letter is one Ulric Van den Bogaerde, the father of Derek Van den Bogaerde — better known as Dirk Bogarde!

The family had a home in Clayton, Sussex, and there can't have been too many U. V. Bogaerdes in England in the 1940s, certainly not in a small Sussex village.

image.jpeg
 
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DIY experiments to recreate optical phenomena at home


Some special ice halos may be reproduced faithfully using water-filled glasses as well. For instance, illuminating a cylindrical water-filled glass or a V-shaped cocktail glass (Martini glass) one may reproduce the circumzenithal arc (CZA) and circumhorizontal arc (CHA) or the suncave Parry arc, see below. These experiments produce pure spectra, provided that the distance of the projection surface is far enough away from the glasses. For the CZA the illumination angle must be shallower than 32°, whereas for the CHA the illumination must be very steep from below.
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Capture.JPG

https://photonicsdesign.jimdo.com/experiments/
 
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