valentine moon

[pippa]

ring around the moon.

WOW!!!!

just been outside to fill up the coal scuttle and the sky is just astounding tonight. a real bonus living just about at far west in wales as you can get is that the night skies here are spectacular - full of zillions of stars. poor you in the big towns and cities.

tonight it's beautifully clear and there is an extraordinary huge hazy ring/halo around the moon at quite a distance from it. it's a 3/4 and gleamingly bright moon.

lucky ol' me

14 feb 2011

[Joe K]

It should be close to a full moon tonight, with hopefully clear skies.

It would be great to live away from light pollution, or even be within an hours drive of a place like Exmoor. Sark has just been named first 'dark sky island', and some day, we shall have to try and visit it...

www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jan/31/sark-first-dark-sky-island

[Jonjel]

I recall driving over Salisbury plain late on a crystal clear bitter cold winter night.

I had to stop get out of the car and look at the sheer beauty of the sky. Not even a spec of light pollution where I stopped, which is pretty rare in the UK.

I am lucky to have little pollution where I live and I often step outside to look at 'my sky' before I turn in, especially in the summer.

[helen]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-watL-l4Wjw Great tune about rings around things, here's my pic farm3.static.flickr.com/2295/2275552142_4170252d62.jpg. Wish we had a little less light at night here but Telford is a pain, 20 miles SW of here is one of the darkest places in England. There's a telescope there charged with looking for asteroids and stuff like that. www.spaceguarduk.com/ If you are interested.

[Jonjel]

Helen,

'This Picture is currently unavailable' is the message I get on your link.

Not one of those 'adult' sites is it? _{(he said hopefully)}

[Joe K]

The flickr link seems to be split in two.

This might work...

farm3.static.flickr.com/2295/2275552142_4170252d62.jpg



Works even better as an image

[pippa]

yes, i've seen the smaller rings like the one in the image. is it to do with moisture in the atmosphere?

however the one i saw was different in that it was very much further away from the moon taking up a massive area of the sky. the haze clearly defined within an inner and outer edge. and the brightness of the 3/4 moon was extraordinary too.

[Joe K]

I seem to recall hearing something about ice crystals, but like Howard Wolowitz, I'm not scientist (tho I have my uses:)), so it could just be water droplets.

[helen]

It is down to ice crystals and you can get them round the sun too. Other stuff in the sky can be attributed to ice like sun dogs, sun pillars and many more. It's the cloud cirrostratus up at around 20000 feet. It's mostly ice crystals and depends upon the shape of the crystals, which depends upon the humidity, temperature, wind and other variables. If the cloud, which is barely visible, is composed of mostly of hexagonal prism shaped crystals you get a fairly small halo (22°) but if you get longer crystals you get a bigger halo ( 46°). I suggest you buy this book if you want to know more www.amazon.co.uk/Cloudspotters-Guide-Gavin-Pretor-Pinney/dp/034089590X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1298120951&sr=8-1 It's superb. Here's a link to the website, which, if you're interested in weather is superb. cloudappreciationsociety.org/ Love to hear from other weather lovers.

[Joe K]

I thought it might be something about the refractive quality of crystals that created a tighter band. I suppose it's theoretically possible for the moon to create a bow on a rainy night, but it would be too hard to see.

Wow, I've heard of sun dogs, but never really knew what they were...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_dog

[pippa]

thankyou for the explanation, helen, and also the link to the clouds appreciation site. coincidentally i was looking at a friends blog last night where there was another link to it.

there's loads of sky phenomena in these parts and weird cloud formations. i recently took photos of a striped sky that looked unreal. alternating bands of grey rain cloud and white cloud, one after the other stretching across and filling the sky. looked man made. another time i'm sure it was the northern lights i saw on the north horizon over the preseli's which was like a curtain of pale rainbow colour. double sun dogs too just a couple of months ago while giving a lift to someone. it was like this one i found on the wbe but there were two of of them near each other.

[helen]

I have loads of pics of sun dogs, haloes, azimuthal arcs and all manner of other stuff in the sky even a tornado here in Shropshire on this PC here. Don't know how to up load them, feeling a bit silly now, tried making a link in the usual way but it failed. How do you post whole pictures from Picassa or anywhere to here?! Maybe I'm too old for this computer palarver and should stick to chemistry.

[pippa]

google photobucket and open an account. there you will see you can upload photos from your computer. then mouse over uploaded pic and it will give you the url to copy and paste here. if you look at all the buttons above the text box (here) there's a picture icon. put the url within these but without spaces , [ img ] url [ /img ] i put the space in because otherwise the brackets wont show.

if you get stuck you can always go to the quote and see how others have done it.

if you have picassa (not really sure how it works) but before you upload to photobucket you can resize your photos so they are not more than 800 longest edge. typical photo size is 800x600.

you can also, i believe, use basic editing in photobucket , resizing, cropping etc.

[pippa]

if you want to post an image from the net ,right click your mouse and if you're using firefox click on 'view image info', copy the url. in internet explorer right click mouse and click on 'properties', copy the url.
best to make sure the image size iis not to big when you preview it otherwise it will throw out the proportions here and viewing the board will be a pain.