Saturday, February 12, 2011

Arc me!

I saw a rare sight today. Possibly rarer than dolphins in the Yarra. I happened to look up as I was walking to catch a train home at Southern Cross Station and I saw a rainbow in the clouds. Not a rainbow...RAINBOW COLOURED CLOUDS, PEOPLE! 


 "What the?" I thought. I wondered if it was my sunglasses (sometimes the polarised lenses give a rainbow tint to some surfaces) but the colours remained when I switched to my specs.  Of course, I took photos to prove I wasn't going loco.

According to National Geographic (yay for the internet!) rainbow clouds are rare and happen when the sun is high in the sky and passes through high altitude, wispy clouds which have ice particles shaped like thick plates, and these plates are lying parallel with the ground. It's called a circumhorizontal arc. Cool, eh?

Here's to looking up. You see stuff.

Edit: According to this guy, rainbow clouds aren't rare, but hey, they're rare to me. I like how the last paragraph of his post echoes mine.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

They must be rare. I have never seen nor heard of them and nor have you.

a work in progress said...

i'd never heard of them either! very cool :)

Julian said...

Oh wow, that's really pretty. Don't think I've ever heard of them.