An unusual and very rare phenomenon was recently noticed in the sky over Great Britain. The people gave him the poetic name “eye of God”, because the phenomenon looks like a halo, or a halo around the sun, which in its shape really resembles a huge eye.
The phenomenon itself and as many as three of its features were recorded by astronomer Alan Fitzsimmons from the Queen’s University of Belfast in Northern Ireland. His pictures were published by Live Science. (Scroll to the end to see photos.)
The scientist made impressive shots on May 28 in the sky over the Belfast Botanical Gardens. According to Fitzsimmons, the phenomenon could be seen for about 30 minutes. It looked like several shining arcs and halos of light encircling the sky.
The scientist explained that such a halo causes light to pass through millions of tiny, perfectly spaced ice crystals in the upper atmosphere, often accompanying thin cirrus clouds. “If the winds are very uniform there, the hexagonal crystals will align. This allows the sunlight refracted through them to combine, as light refracts through a prism, creating arcs and circles of sunlight,” Fitzsimmons said.
His lens captured at least three different confirmed optical phenomena: a 22-degree halo, a large circle surrounding the sun; a pair of sunbeams – bright dots on each side of the 22-degree halo; and the full parhelic circle, a line dividing the circle in half, and also forming a full circle around the entire sky.
The phenomenon was also seen that day in other parts of Northern Ireland, as well as northern England and Scotland, according to Spaceweather.com. The portal indicates that a complete parhelic circle is very rare because it requires at least five internal reflections from millions of individual ice crystals simultaneously catching the sun’s rays. According to him, the images may also include elements of a limited halo and supralateral arch, which form the eyelids above and below the 22-degree halo.
As the author of the images explained, the parhelic circle is the rarest and most impressive feature that he was able to capture. Fitzsimmons admitted that he had seen this only a few times in his life. Other natural phenomena recorded by him are much more common. However, we hardly notice them, because the sun is too dazzling to be freely viewed by anyone who wishes.
Tiny atmospheric ice crystals can also create a number of other amazing visual phenomena, scientists say, such as polar stratospheric clouds shining like a rainbow in the Arctic, and glowing clouds at night (also called noctilucent clouds) that can be seen around the Earth’s hemisphere in June and July.
Earlier, GLOBAL HAPPENINGS published explanations of scientists why it seems to many that the Sun has recently changed color and shape.
Source: Obozrevatel
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