Posts Tagged moon lightning

Our Strange Sky: Double Moonbow Over Hawaii

Because of Ethan Tweedie we learned there is such a thing as moonbows.

A moonbow (also known as a lunar rainbow, lunar bow or white rainbow) is a rainbow produced by light reflected off the surface of the moon rather than from direct sunlight.

Moonbows are relatively faint, due to the smaller amount of light reflected from the surface of the moon. They are always in the opposite part of the sky from the moon.

It is difficult for the human eye to discern colors in a moonbow because the light is usually too faint to excite the cone color receptors in human eyes. As a result, they often appear to be white. However, the colors in a moonbow do appear in long exposure photographs.

Also, we’ve got to visit Kamuela, Hawaii.

via space weather

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Look…Up in the Sky!

Flipped through Astronomy Picture of the Day‘s month of October. Two wicked awesome pictures were found:

Moon Lightning
moonlightning
Moonsets are not often quite as exciting as this one. But amateur astronomer Marc-Andre Besel was impressed by the brilliant lighting displays that joined the first quarter Moon and stars of the constellation Scorpius in western skies. On August 22, 2004, his view looked across the Gulf of Mexico from Anna Maria Island, Florida, USA, a region that would experience even more stormy weather in the coming days

Contrails

contrails_nasa
Artificial clouds made by humans may become so common they change the Earth’s climate. The long thin cloud streaks that dominate the above satellite photograph of Georgia are contrails, cirrus clouds created by airplanes. The exhaust of an airplane engine can create a contrail by saturating the surrounding air with extra moisture.

Click the pics for more info on each.

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