Moon Halos

At right silhouetted against winter's bare branches, a 22° halo imaged by Rafael Schmall in Hungary at Fejer, Adony city.  ISO400, 13s exp, f 3.5



This February's lunation saw an unusually large number of 22° halos submitted to OPOD!   Here are some.    European observers braved brutally cold clear nights. Others were in warmer climes.

Night skies show well this familiar, most frequent yet only partially understood halo.

We see it is not a ring but instead glows outside its subdued red inner edge shading slowly into velvety darkness.

The stars help gauge its size.   Here it is centred on the moon in Taurus yet on one side slices through Orion the Hunter and on the other reaches Perseus son of Zeus and Danae, founder of Mycenae.

All images ©individual photographers, shown with permission
The scene from New Hampshire, USA pictured by Bob Colwell.

Note the red hues of supergiant Betelgeuse and Aldebaran.
Atmospheric
Optics
TWAN photographer Tamas Ladanyi (site) captured the halo over the castle at Veszprem in Hungary.
Australian halo pictured at Brisbane by Peter Frankland
Tam�s �brah�m marks the constellations in this image from his backyard in Hungary.
Enough of circles?   Brandon Longo saw this fragment of a lunar circumscribed halo at Ventura, California, USA.


"There was a circumscribed arc above, but not around, the sun earlier that day. In addition, there was a circumzenithal arc, a weak 22 degree halo and sundogs. The solar halos lasted no more than 25 minutes since I first saw them. After sunset, when the moon was about 20° high, there weren't any halos visible except for an evanescent moon dog that formed after a contrail remnant passed by.

Then around 3:15 UTC, a lunar 22° formed. This lasted until ~5:30 UTC when the cirrostratus clouds left. At 3:55 UTC I noticed brightening of the top of the 22° halo and the photo that I was taking at the time showed a circumscribed arc forming.  Within 10 minutes it was the dominating feature."


The halo pictured by Robert Rosenberg at Adony, Hungary
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The moon rides high in warm Tenerife in the Spanish Canary Islands.    Image by Roberto Porto.