Oh. Do you recognize that line-shaped cloud in the photo?Fascinating. He also posted this photo:
Patrick Roddie has posted this video showing a strange double halo
A more recent description on an unlikely web site:A new explanation is proposed for the rare Scheiner's halo, observed in the sky at an angle of 28° from the sun or moon. The existing explanation invokes the presence in the atmosphere of the cubic form of ice, ice Ic. However, extensive laboratory work has not demonstrated that ice Ic can form under conditions found in the atmosphere. We point out an alternative, that polycrystals of ice Ih (the ordinary hexagonal polymorph), in which specific orientation relations exist between adjacent crystals, are another possible cause of Scheiner's halo. Polycrystals with the appropriate orientation relation are not uncommon in the atmosphere, but concentrations sufficient to produce optical effects are expected to be rare. There appears to be no decisive evidence to rule out either of these explanations.
Now if this thing has only been reported 7 times in the last 350 years, and Patrick Roddie observed it then he can really say it is incredibly rare!A rare halo around the sun or the moon sometimes appears at 28 degrees instead of 22 degrees. But don’t stay up late gazing at the full moon to see it. This halo, called Scheiner’s halo, has been reported only seven times in the last 350 years. Scientists know that such a halo could be caused by octahedral, or eight-sided crystals. What crystals could cause this 28 degree halo? The mystery was recently solved by scientists working with cubic ice. Cubic ice is an unusual form of water ice. When water is frozen at temperatures of 100 below zero it forms octahedral instead of hexagonal crystals. They used a little math to show that octahedral water crystals could cause Scheiner’s halo. Scientists are now trying to discover whether conditions in the upper atmosphere could actually form cubic ice.
Double Sun Halo
Uploaded by: Skyywatcher88
Tuesday February 23, 2016
Ballico, CA (Current Weather Conditions)
Caption: I must say this is a first! Photo by Richard Sears
Camera Type: iPhone 5s
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2. jjulian
1:23 PM GMT on February 24, 2016
I've never seen this before, pretty amazing capture, congrats!
llpj04
11:46 PM GMT on February 23, 2016
I've have never caught one like this! Have not seen many on WU either
Last seen 1974. Now that's "incredibly rare".Actually there were three circles around the sun, and a very, vet faint fourth one http://spaceweathergallery.com/indiv_upload.php?upload_id=123044 You may read more about your display here http://www.atoptics.co.uk/halo/pyrhalo.htm A very good catch!
Posted by mila 2016-02-23 21:38:18
Dr Terence Meaden tells me
I know this one. It is extremely rare. I was fortunate to see it in 1974. Through the medium of the Roy Met Soc magazine Weather, I found others who had seen it. They all lived in a broad band right across southern England. I was the last witness as the Cs cloud moved eastwards. Three of us wrote it up as a paper published in 1974.
I refer to the paper The concentric halo display of 14 April 1974, by E.C.W. Goldie, G.T. Meaden and Richard White. WEATHER Volume 31, 304-312 (1976). As you know the commonest halo is the 22-degree one, and the 46 halo is very infrequent.
The ones that I saw between 1840 and 1905 GMT were estimated as 9, 22, 24, and 26/27---plus also the upper arc of contact to the 22 one.
Other observers also saw haloes at 18 , 32 and 46. Twelve observers in all. Furthest east was The Hague in Holland; furthest west was me in Trowbridge. We published sketches and examined the physics of the situation. We wondered whether numerous earlier condensation trails produced the pyramidal ice crystals of the cirrus and cirrostratus clouds.
Posted by Glaznoz 2016-02-24 08:11:34
Of course with so many halos, it becomes harder to argue that it's all just ice crystals.
Well, except that this is unlikely to be seen again in the next several years. So unless chemtrails have only been sprayed on this one day, then it's all ice crystals.
And of course these halos are explained by ice crystals, just odd shaped ones.
PYRAMIDS OVER CALIFORNIA: People who pay attention to the daytime sky often notice a luminous ring surrounding the sun. It's called an ice halo, caused by sunlight shining through ice crystals in wispy cirrus clouds. On Feb. 23rd, San Francisco photographer Mila Zinkova looked up and saw not one, but "four wondrous circles around the sun." She quickly moved into the shadow of a totem pole and snapped this picture:
About 100 miles away in Ballico, California, Richard Sears witnessed a similar display. "I've been photographing sun halos here in California for years. I must say, this is the first," says Sears. "I wonder what is going on here?"
The answer: The air was filled with tiny pyramids of ice.
Atmospheric optics expert Les Cowley explains: "These are magnificent and rare displays of pyramidal crystal halos. Ordinary halos are made by six-sidedcolumn- or plate-shaped crystals in high and cold cirrus clouds. Over California their ends were capped with pyramids. The pyramids always have fixed angles set by planes of atoms in the ice. Light passing through them form 'odd radius halos' 9, 18, 20, 23, 24 and 35 degrees from the sun. On Mila's image I can see a bright 9 degree ring, an 18 degree one and then a clump of twenty-something radius halos."
That's a different assessment from what we arrived at. From Mick's comparison with an earlier photo by Patrick Roddie, we found that the inner outer ring is the 22° halo, and in that case the outer one must be at 28°. But if Les Cowley is right then the inner one is at 18° and the outer one should be the 22°."On Mila's image I can see a bright 9 degree ring, an 18 degree one and then a clump of twenty-something radius halos."
Is there a time stamp? I could not find the original.Fascinating. He also posted this photo:
No. A rainbow is at ~41 degrees from the anti-solar point, so it would be a 180-41 = 139-degree halo.So is a rainbow half of a 180 degree halo?
As @skephu says, it is a measure of the diameter (or radius, in this case). If you don't know the distance of an object (or, as in this case, it is not a physical object) then the only way you can express its size is in degrees: the amount of the field of view that it occupies.Okay, I finally have to ask.
Circles are 360 degrees, so how can there be a 22 degree circle? The definition for the sun halo says it's 22 degrees from the sun, but it surrounds the sun completely, so what does that actually mean? I get it seems to be referring to distance from the center, but don't understand how it's measured or why it's expressed as a degree.
So is a rainbow half of a 180 degree halo?
No. A rainbow is at ~41 degrees from the anti-solar point, so it would be a 180-41 = 139-degree halo.
A 180 degree halo would be a straight line
No, it would be point of light opposite the sun.
The photo has been taken from the roof of the building listed as his address. Adding it to Google Earth also matches the Sun position, suggesting that the photo was taken shortly before it was posted on Facebook at 2:54 PM EST.Fascinating. He also posted this photo:
That's a different assessment from what we arrived at. From Mick's comparison with an earlier photo by Patrick Roddie, we found that the inner outer ring is the 22° halo, and in that case the outer one must be at 28°. But if Les Cowley is right then the inner one is at 18° and the outer one should be the 22°.
Rainbows are 42° you can generally only see half of it because the rest would be underground. If you get high enough you can see the whole thing.
Okay, I finally have to ask.
Circles are 360 degrees, so how can there be a 22 degree circle? The definition for the sun halo says it's 22 degrees from the sun, but it surrounds the sun completely, so what does that actually mean? I get it seems to be referring to distance from the center, but don't understand how it's measured or why it's expressed as a degree.
OK, so then the outer ring is not Scheiner's halo after all. That's better because Scheiner's is too rare.Overlaying them with no scaling shows that the 22° halo more closely matches the outer halo
OK, so then the outer ring is not Scheiner's halo after all. That's better because Scheiner's is too rare.