Mid-afternoon yesterday, as Jann and I were nearing the end of a favorite loop hike in Etna, I spotted a 22 degree halo, a fairly rare event. The halo was strong and dramatic. The camera I was carrying had a long zoom and therefore could not come close to capturing the halo with a single shot. So I tried my iPhone, and even that was not wide enough to capture it in a single photo.
We hustled back to our car. I grabbed a very wide angle lens (14-28mm eq.) and took a few photos of the event. I was not worried about my eyes because I was not looking at the sun directly through the lens but on the camera monitor.
I knew that, although I captured the halo, the photo would be a bit sterile with just the sun and its surrounding halo. So we drove about a mile to a spot with something I could use as a foreground. Just as with sunrises or sunsets, photos are better with some interesting foreground rather than just pretty colored clouds.
The photo below makes it look like the sun was lower in the sky than it actually was. That is because I was down a small hill shooting up at the barn and trees.
Often these events are very transitory. Poof and they are gone. Did I really see it? Amazingly, this one lasted well over an hour.
22 degree halos, as well as the sun dogs that sometimes accompany them, are caused by the refraction of light from plate-shaped hexagonal ice crystals falling through the atmosphere. It was 70 degrees on earth, but much colder up in the clouds.
Many wonderful things happen in the sky that often go unnoticed. It is a matter of looking and being aware of the unusual. If you would like to see more of the amazing things that can be observed by looking up, CLICK HERE. You won’t regret it.