Strange clouds and lights in our sky's, updated! Yet again

COLD SUN: You know its cold when the rising sun shines through icicles ... in Florida. Mark Staples took this rare photo overlooking Little Lake Santa Fe near Waldo, FL, on Jan. 7th:
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"The golden sunrise turned these colorless spikes of ice into something resembling the fiery trails we occasional see from here when NASA launches a space shuttle," says Staples. "The warmth of the sun quickly reduced these Florida-cicles, but it was a rare a beautiful sight while it lasted."

This is, however, just the tip of the icicle. The remarkable cold, which has struck not only the United States, but also England and China, is creating widespread displays of atmospheric optics. The sun shining through ice in the air produces sundogs, sun pillars, and a variety of luminous rings and arcs. See below







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Moving sunpillar and moondogs

P-M Hedén
Image taken:
Jan. 7, 2010
Location:
Tänndalen, Sweden
Details:

Very cold in Sweden, -34 degree C during night. One morning I saw this nice sunpillar and made a time-lapse of the movement http://www.clearskies.se/Sunpillar%20time-lapse.htm And during night the moon created some nice moondogs and halo: http://www.clearskies.se/Moondogs%20and%20halo%20time-lapse.htm


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****New update The Bible signs in our sky's****

MOON HALO ALERT: It's cold outside. The Moon is waxing full. There's ice in the air. Add them all together and you have perfect conditions for a ring around the Moon:
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Photo details: Canon EOS 5D, 8mm fisheye lens, ISO 200, 10s
"I happened to take a stroll outside last night," says photographer David Harvey of Tucson, Arizona. "The Moon was nearly overhead and surrounded by this eye-catching 22o halo."

Such haloes are formed when moonlight passes through pencil-shaped ice crystals floating in high freezing clouds. When you see a 22o moon halo, be alert for moondogs and moon pillars, too. They are formed by plate-shaped ice crystals that often accompany their pencil-shaped cousins.

The Moon is full on Dec. 31st. Mark your calendar for haloes.

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AFTER THE STORM: Earlier this week, a powerful blizzard paralyzed parts of the US midwest. Mike Hollingshead of Blair, Nebraska, walked outside after the storm and this is what he saw:
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Sunlight shining through ice crystals had produced a bright pair of sundogs and a vivid circumzenithal arc. "These tend to appear on the backside of a storm's clearing line as ice crystals blow through the air," notes Hollingshead. "It's a beautiful sight but not a ton of fun to photograph at 5o F with winds blowing 40 mph."

Photographers, bundle up! More weather is on the way and there should be plenty to see after the storm.


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Mysterious Spiral in the Norwegian sky!

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You can read the rest, with video's here on The Big Wobble


BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY: It was snowing lightly in Harney County, Oregon, yesterday when a brilliant column of light came lancing out of the clouds. "It was like Beam me up, Scotty!" says Raven, who witnessed the event. "The light came through a hole in the clouds and went all the way down to the desert floor."
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The name of this phenomenon is "lower sun pillar." It is caused by sunlight mixed with ice: Plate-shaped ice crystals flutter down from the clouds like leaves falling from trees. Air resistance causes the crystals' broad faces to line up in the horizontal direction, creating many little mirrors to intercept and reflect the rays of the sun overhead.

Sun pillars are usually of the upper variety. Lower pillars appear on rare occasions when the sun is blocked by icy clouds and the observer is on a high perch. Raven took her picture from a hillside at 4200 feet.

Is it snowing where you live? Ice in the air mixed with sunlight can produce a variety of luminous forms. Be alert for things under the sun.


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Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh


Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh
Credit: Vincent van Gogh; Digital image courtesy of Wikipedia
Explanation: The painting Starry Night is one of the most famous icons of the night sky ever created. The scene was painted by Vincent van Gogh in southern France in 1889. The swirling style of Starry Night appears, to many, to make the night sky come alive. Although van Gogh frequently portrayed real settings in his paintings, art historians do not agree on precisely what stars and planets are being depicted in Starry Night. The style of Starry Night is post-impressionism, a popular painting style at the end of the nineteenth century. The original Starry Night painting hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, New York, USA.

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Smile your day!

Smile, in these trying times a simple photo can change your day!



CLEAR AIR RAINBOW: Two days ago, photographer Martin McKenna was driving down a country road near Maghera, Northern Ireland, when he saw a curious thing. "There was a faint rainbow arcing through the crystal-clear blue sky," he says. Rainbows usually require rain, so a clear air rainbow is a curious thing indeed. Where did it come from? The answer may be found below McKenna's picture of the phenomenon
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"There was some rain," explains McKenna. "Strong winds had blown some precipitation over from the northwest where showers where gathering in the distance, and this is what caused the 'bow. It looked most unusual."

Atmospheric optics expert Les Cowley says that there is another way to make clear air rainbows. The method requires conditions of high humidity: "A rainbow can be formed by droplets condensing in a layer of saturated and otherwise apparently clear air. Droplets formed in this way tend to be small, and the rainbows they make are relatively broad."

"Clear air rainbows are always a surprise," he adds, "and where the raindrops come from can be puzzling." Sky watchers should look for them any time the sky is blue.


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Another near miss!

Click on image to enlarge, video below

GREAT FIREBALL: A remarkable midnight fireball that "turned night into day" over parts of the western United States last night was not a Leonid. Infrasound measurements suggest a sporadic asteroid not associated with the Leonid debris stream. The space rock exploded in the atmosphere with an energy equivalent to 0.5 - 1 kilotons of TNT. Approximately 6 hours later, observers in Utah and Colorado witnessed a twisting iridescent-blue cloud in the dawn sky. Debris from the fireball should have dissipated by that time, but the cloud remains unexplained; we cannot yet rule out a connection to the fireball event. Stay tuned for further analysis.

Video Courtesy of KSL.com

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I took this photo earlier this evening of a strange halo circling the Moon.
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Rings around the Moon.

When thin clouds scud across a bright moon it is often surrounded by a bright disk and faint coloured rings, a lunar corona.

Eva Seidenfaden's (Atmospheric optics) evocative image unusually shows the moon's disc, it usually has to be overexposed to capture the much fainter corona.

©2004 Eva Seidenfaden, shown with permission. Source

RAINBOW AT NIGHT:
Have you ever seen a rainbow after dark? It happened last night in Yorkshire, UK, where Christopher Walker photographed a multi-colored band arcing over the countryside:
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Rainbows appear when sunlight is reflected from raindrops. But in this case, the sun was not required; the Frosty Moon was bright enough to do the job on its own. "The moonlight was so bright I could see red in the rainbow with my unaided eye," says Walker. "A 30 second exposure with my digital camera revealed [the full range of rainbow colors]."
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Angel of The North

NORTHERN LIGHTS: A solar wind stream hit Earth on Oct. 24th and sparked geomagnetic storms around the Arctic Circle. "The auroras were extremely active with fast-moving curtains of green, blue and red," reports Niels Giroud of Mo i Rana, Norway, who recorded the scene using a Nikon D200:



Coming just a week before Halloween, the display was appropriately spooky-looking. But it can't hold a pumpkin's candle to the Halloween storms of 2003 when blood-red Northern Lights startled sky watchers as far south as Florida and Texas. A movie from NASA recalls the ghoulish tale: Here

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Bizarre Cloud Filmed Over Romania.



Bizarre Autumn Cloud Formation In Russia.



Mammatus clouds


Also known as mammatocumulus, meaning "bumpy clouds", they are a cellular pattern of pouches hanging underneath the base of a cloud. Composed primarily of ice, Mammatus Clouds can extend for hundreds of miles in each direction, while individual formations can remain visibly static for ten to fifteen minutes at a time. True to their ominous appearance, mammatus clouds are often harbingers of a coming storm or other extreme weather system.


Mystery UFO halo over Moscow

THIS glowing halo in clouds over Moscow looks like an Independence Day style alien attack.

The astonishing ring was spotted over the city and captured on video by stunned locals.

It has been described as a "true mystery" by a UFO expert.

He said: "I've never seen anything like this. It's a true mystery.

"Whatever it is, it's one of the most beautiful and spectacular things I've ever seen.

"Speculation is at fever pitch on the internet."

"This is being discussed on forums, blogs and email lists all around the world. Some people say it's a bizarre meteorological effect.

"Theories range from it being an alien mothership, proof of Russian weather modification technology - a weather weapon - or even a sign of the end of the world



ITALIAN GLORY: Yesterday, photographers Andrea Alessandrini and Paolo Candy were flying over Italy's Tirrenum Sea when they looked out the window of their airplane and saw this:

It was a glory--"one of the prettiest I've ever seen," says Candy. And that means something because he's written a book on the subject.

Glories are rings of light around your shadow. They are caused by sunlight reflected backwards from water droplets in clouds. Exactly how backscattering produces the colorful rings is a mystery involving surface waves and multiple reflections within individual droplets. Each sighting is a puzzle--all the more reason to seek them out.

"Glories are often seen from aircraft," notes atmospheric optics expert Les Cowley. "Get a seat opposite the sun and watch them ring the aircraft's shadow." Airplanes are not absolutely required, however. All you really need is a high perch and moist clouds. Look for glories on mountains and hillsides, in sea fog, and even indoors.

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Harvest Moons








HARVEST MOONBOWS: This weekend's Harvest Moon mesmerized onlookers with its luminous beauty. In Missouri Valley, Iowa, photographer Mike Hollingshead managed to tear his eyes away for a moment and he discovered an even better show behind his back:

"It was a lunar fogbow," says Hollingshead. "The bright light of the Harvest Moon was shining into a fogbank rising over a recently-harvested field. The resulting fogbow was surprisingly vivid and well-defined." (The star-like speck near the center of the 'bow is Venus shining through the mist.)

Fogbows are sometimes called "white rainbows," and that's about right. Both rainbows and fogbows are caused by light reflected from water droplets. When the droplets are large (rain), they act like prisms, spreading the colors wide for easy visibility. When the droplets are small (fog), the prism-action is reduced, and colors are smeared together into a ghostly-white arc.

In Maghera, Northern Ireland, Martin McKenna also looked away from the Harvest Moon and witnessed a true lunar rainbow. "An evening shower moved in and as if by magic a rainbow appeared directly opposite the Moon," he says. "It only lasted for one minute but it was a great sight."

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Wonderful Harvest moon with strange flashes and a giant saucer

A lovely night to capture the Moon, what I didn't expect was the huge saucer shape lower right of the moon on the first picture! And an extra bonus, a short video below with two unexplainable flashing lights!

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I was filming a perfect moon this evening around 9pm. The sky was cloudless, no wind and still, as I filmed the moon, two mysterious flashes appeared, the flashes are clearly not from a plane because the flashes would be much more frequent and they would continue across the screen, a helicopter would have a continuous light showing and the noise of the rotor blades would be heard on such a still night.

LAST SUNSET OF SUMMER: Last night in Florida, summer came to an end in a flash of green. "My wife and I drove to Clearwater Beach beach to photograph the sunset," says Don Roberts. "I had never seen a green flash before and was excited to see and shoot a real beauty as my first." He used a Canon 50D to record the moment:
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The green flash is a mirage. It occurs when there is warm air immediately over the ocean waters and the air temperature changes rapidly with height. These conditions magnify the usually-subtle prismatic refraction of the low atmosphere into an exuberant explosion of emerald green.

What kind of sunsets will autumn bring? Tonight brings the first; take a look!

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Aurora Over Yellowknife
Credit & Copyright: Yuichi Takasaka (Blue Moon Promotions), TWAN
Explanation: Sometimes, after your eyes adapt to the dark, a spectacular sky appears. In this case, a picturesque lake lies in front of you, beautiful green auroras flap high above you, brilliant stars shine far in the distance, and a brilliant moon shines just ahead of you. This digitally fused panorama was captured earlier this month from Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada, and includes the Pleiades open cluster of stars just to the upper right of the Moon. Since aurora are ultimately started by solar activity, this current flurry of aurora is somewhat surprising, given the historic lack of sunspots and other activity on the Sun over the past two years. This time of year is known as aurora season, however, for noted average increases in auroras. The reason for the yearly increase is not known for sure, but possibly relates to the tilt of the Earth creating a more easily traversable connection between the Earth's magnetic field and the magnetic field of the Sun's changing wind streams.

APOD

Strange clouds

The crew of the ISS have been observing electric-blue "noctilucent" clouds hovering on the edge of space.

Electric blue clouds viewed from the ISS. Photo credit: Don Pettit and NASA TV.
They hover on the edge of space. Thin, wispy clouds, glowing electric blue. Some scientists think they're seeded by space dust. Others suspect they're a telltale sign of global warming.
They're called noctilucent or "night-shining" clouds (NLCs). And whatever causes them, they're lovely.
"Over the past few weeks we've been enjoying outstanding views of these clouds above the southern hemisphere," said space station astronaut Don Pettit during a NASA TV broadcast last month. "We routinely see them when we're flying over Australia and the tip of South America."
Sky watchers on Earth have seen them, too, glowing in the night sky after sunset, although the view from Earth-orbit is better. Pettit estimated the height of the noctilucent clouds he saw at 80 to 100 km ... "literally on the fringes of space."

"Noctilucent clouds are a relatively new phenomenon," says Gary Thomas, a professor at the University of Colorado who studies NLCs. "They were first seen in 1885" about two years after the powerful eruption of Krakatoa hurled plumes of volcanic ash as much as 80 km high in Earth's atmosphere.

Ash from the Indonesian volcano caused such splendid sunsets worldwide that evening sky watching became a popular past time. One sky watcher in particular, a German named T.W. Backhouse who is often credited with the discovery of noctilucent clouds, noticed something odd. He stayed outside after the sun had set and, on some nights, saw wispy filaments glowing electric blue against the black sky. Scientists of the day figured they were some curious manifestation of volcanic ash.

Eventually the ash settled and the vivid sunsets of Krakatoa faded. Yet the noctilucent clouds remained. "It's puzzling," says Thomas. "Noctilucent clouds have not only persisted, but also spread." A century ago the clouds were confined to latitudes above 50o; you had to go to places like Scandinavia, Russia and Britain to see them. In recent years they have been sighted as far south as Utah and Colorado.

Above: Noctilucent clouds over Finland. The orange hues near the horizon are ordinary sunset colors, notes Gary Thomas. NLCs, on the other hand, are usually "luminous blue-white or sometimes just pale white," he says. Image credit Pekka Parviainen.

Astronaut Don Pettit is a long-time noctilucent cloud-watcher. As a staff scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory between 1984 and 1996, he studied noctilucent clouds seeded by high-flying sounding rockets. "Seeing these kinds of clouds [from space] ... is certainly a joy for us on the ISS," he said on NASA TV.

"Although NLCs look like they're in space," continues Thomas, "they're really inside Earth's atmosphere, in a layer called the mesosphere ranging from 50 to 85 km high." The mesosphere is not only very cold (-125 C), but also very dry--"one hundred million times dryer than air from the Sahara desert." Nevertheless, NLCs are made of water. The clouds consist of tiny ice crystals about the size of particles in cigarette smoke.

How ice crystals form in the arid mesosphere is the essential mystery of noctilucent clouds.

Ice crystals in clouds need two things to grow: water molecules and something for those molecules to stick to--dust, for example. Water gathering on dust to form droplets or ice crystals is a process called nucleation. It happens all the time in ordinary clouds.

Another noctilucent cloud seen from the ISS. Earth's horizon has been deliberately overexposed to reveal the faint cloudtops. "That little diaphanous line you see paralleling Earth's horizon is an NLC," said Pettit. Photo credit: Don Pettit and NASA TV.

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SATURDAY NIGHT LIGHT SHOW: The phones started ringing around 7:30 pm EDT on Saturday night, Sept. 19th. All along the US Atlantic seaboard, police stations and news desks received reports of strange lights in the sky. John A. Blackwell of Exeter, New Hampshire, snapped this picture of the phenomenon:
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"It was an impressive display," says Blackwell. "To the naked eye, it was visible for about a minute."
It looks like a passing comet or a giant, luminous amoeba. But this was pure rocket science. The cloud was created by a Black Brant XII sounding rocket launched from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The rocket released a cloud of electrically-charged aerosols near the top of Earth's atmosphere to investigate the formation of noctilucent clouds or "NLCs." Mysterious NLCs form naturally around Earth's poles during the months of northern summer. On this September evening, researchers decided to see if they could create an artificial NLC at mid-latitudes; it seems to have worked.
Ground-based cameras and radars along the Atlantic coast monitored the experiment while the STPSat-1 satellite watched from Earth orbit. Principal investigators at the Naval Research Lab hope the data will reveal much about the microphysics of noctilucent clouds and the possible role of rockets in creating them.

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Fogbow
I was out on my sailboat, making my way through the fog in the Prince William Sound, and suddenly an Albino rainbow appeared.



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AUTUMN SUNRISE: Morning fog is a sign of autumn. The weeks of late September and early October often bring banks of fog to the countryside, where moist ground has spent the lengthening night cooling under a cloudless, starry sky. The combination of cool air and low fog can produce some interesting vistas:

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Mike Hollingshead of Blair, Nebraska, took the picture at daybreak on Sept. 16th. "A few mornings ago, I noticed how red the sun appeared when it rose through the fog," he says. "I wanted more--and yesterday I got it." The sun was not only reddened but also miraged by a temperature inversion in the air above the chilly field.

"These foggy mornings produce some nice photo-ops," he says. "You just need a bit of a hill to shoot from to see the mirage, but not too high because you want to shoot through the fog to get the vibrant red stuff."

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If woken by a tumultuous storm outside, most of us will wisely pull the covers over our heads and try to go back to sleep. For one plucky photographer though, it was the chance to dash outside and capture some truly electric images.
Frank Fennema from California made the trip from his home in Tiburon down to the Golden Gate Bridge.
Click on picture to enlarge
Shrouded by fog the Golden Gate Bridge is lit up by fork lightning/a>

'I woke up at 4.30am on Friday morning to the sound of thunder. I wondered how far off it was,' he said.
'I drove to the Marin Headlands but it was way too foggy so I went low near the Coast Guard station for this shot of the Golden Gate Bridge.

'I sat in my car with a remote shutter listening to podcasts. I had to wrap a poncho around my camera when the rain started.
'As the lightning struck I took lots of shots, this was about my fourth shot of the morning when I got lucky. You should of heard me say "YEEEESS!" when I saw the huge strike and the sky lit up white/blue with light.'

Mr Fennema's resulting images were somewhat spectacular, and perhaps worth the early morning start after all.


Fire rainbow in Holland



The Big Wobble

Morning Glory Clouds Over Australia

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Morning Glory Clouds Over Australia
Credit & Licence: Mick Petroff; Tip Thanks: James Holmes (Cairns)
Explanation: What causes these long, strange clouds? No one is sure. A rare type of cloud known as a Morning Glory cloud can stretch 1,000 kilometers long and occur at altitudes up to two kilometers high. Although similar roll clouds have been seen at specific places across the world, the ones over Burketown, Queensland Australia occur predictably every spring. Long, horizontal, circulating tubes of air might form when flowing, moist, cooling air encounters an inversion layer, an atmospheric layer where air temperature atypically increases with height. These tubes and surrounding air could cause dangerous turbulence for airplanes when clear. Morning Glory clouds can reportedly achieve an airspeed of 60 kilometers per hour over a surface with little discernible wind. Pictured above, photographer Mick Petroff photographed some Morning Glory clouds from his airplane near the Gulf of Carpentaria, Australia.


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FLYING ISLANDS: On August 14th, gravity was revoked in the Netherlands--or so it seemed when photographer Rik ter Horst looked out across the water and saw Schiermonnikoog Island floating in mid-air:

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"It was just a mirage," he says. Temperature gradients in the air over the cool, open water caused light from the island and its surroundings to curve in unusual ways en route to the camera. The apparent gap between the island and the sea is actually an upside-down image of the sky above. Note the hint of antenna pointing into the water. But don't look too closely, cautions Horst. "You might start believing islands can fly."

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Split Sky

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SPLIT SKY: "On my way to view the Perseid meteor shower on August 11th, I witnessed a spectacular sunset," reports Tyler Burg of Little Sioux, Iowa. "The sky seemed to split in half!"
The dark half was a vast shadow, Burg realized, and he looked around to find the source. "The shadow was cast by a thunderstorm floating between me and the sun," he says. "It was crackling beautifully with lightning."

"Later that night I witnessed 217 meteors in a 6 hour observing session," says Burg. "It was the greatest number of meteors I've ever seen in one night. In one outburst there were 41 meteors in 30 minutes, and once I saw 5 Perseids in only 30 seconds!"

http://spaceweather.com/

This bizarre figure casting an enormous shadow over Earth is a massive, anvil-shaped cloud. Called a cumulonimbus, it was pictured by an astronaut aboard the International Space Station as it travelled over west Africa.

Photo evidence of Planet X and Planet Y!

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A Triple Sunrise Over Gdansk Bay
Credit & Copyright: Barry & Noemi Diacon (McMaster U.)
Explanation: How can the same Sun rise three times? Last month on Friday, 2009 July 10, a spectacular triple sunrise was photographed at about 4:30 am over Gdansk Bay in Gdansk, Poland. Clearly, our Sun rises only once. Some optical effect is creating at least two mirages of the Sun -- but which effect? In the vast majority of similarly reported cases, mirages of the brightest object in the frame can be traced to reflections internal to the camera taking the images. Still, the above image is intriguing because a sincere photographer claims the effect was visible to the unaided eye, and because the photographer took several other frames that show variants of the same effect. Therefore, polite readers are invited to debate whether the above image captures a particularly spectacular example of common reflections inside a standard digital camera, shows one of the most spectacular examples of atmospheric lensing yet recorded, or was caused by something completely different. If the discussion converges, the consensus will be posted here at a later date.


AURORAS OVER NEBRASKA: "This past Wednesday, I spent the night at at the Nebraska Star Party in Valentine, Nebraska," says amateur astronomer Howard Edin. "Just after midnight I noticed a pale arc of clouds in the north; after staring for a while I realized they were not clouds," A 30-second exposure he made using his Canon 40D revealed the nature of the phenomenon:

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"It was the aurora borealis," he says.

Although he didn't know it at the time, a solar wind stream had just hit Earth's magnetic field, sparking bright auroras over Canada and several northern-tier US states. Nebraska was at the outer limit of the display, so the auroral colors were too dim for human vision, but a digital camera picked them up quite nicely.


Zoltan Kenwell,
Chip lake and Cynthia Alberta.
Jul. 22, 2009

Paul Meisel,
Ward County, North Dakota
Jul. 22, 2009

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Click on image to enlarge
NLC ALERT: "While India and China were enjoying a total solar eclipse, here in Europe we were treated to a sky show of our own," says Tomasz Adam of Staszów, Poland, where the night sky lit up with intense noctilucent clouds (NLCs) on July 21st and 22nd. "It was easily the best display I've ever seen." A similar event last week heralded NLCs in the United States as far south as Nevada, Colorado and Utah. Sky watchers should be alert for more.



Click on image for large photo
The bright lights of Tucson, Arizona, are more than matched by a flash of lightning far above the city skyline. The sunset scene shows a classic cumulonimbus cloud formation.

The summit of Washington's Mount Rainier lies hidden beneath a stack of horizontally layered lenticular clouds. These clouds are formed by high winds blowing over rough terrain and are sometimes described as a "stack of pancakes."

From the Swami








This wonderful phenomenon is known as a sun dog







Mysterious Sky Shows
February 18, 2009--Remarkably tall artificial light pillars are seen in Ontario, Canada, in January 2004 in this composite panoramic photo.

February 18, 2009--Oddly extraterrestrial-looking, "broken" light pillars glow over Ath, Belgium, on November 20, 2006.


February 18, 2009--A light pillar rises over the setting sun at Lake Tahoe, California, in February 2000.

Though light pillars are often caused by artificial light, sun pillars, as in the above picture, occur when sunlight reflects off the facets of millions of flat ice crystals in very cold air.


February 18, 2009--Light pillars scrape the night sky over Victor, Idaho, on January 26. Typically seen in polar regions, the vertical columns of light have been appearing along with frigid temperatures at lower latitudes this winter.


The Bible states during the end times look to the heavens for sign's, the last few years we have seen a new phenomenon in our sky, below are a few examples!

National Geographic, Fire Rainbow



There is a lot of disinformation about these "Fire Rainbows" on the net. They started showing up about 10 years ago and are NOT rare. I have seen three so far this year.
They can appear at many sun angles and are NOT just seen around a solstice. Note also that the moon now has a COLOR rainbow effect around it at times too. Also that the sun has at times a full circle around it in color too. They are NOT in any of the old textbooks about the atmosphere over ten years ago either.

How the sky looked 30 minutes before the recent Chinese quake!

Bizarre colorful (luminous/glowing) cloud phenomenon in the sky was observed about 30 mins before the May 12, 2008 Sichuan earthquake took place. This was recorded in Tianshui, Gansu province ~450km northeast of epicenter, by someone using a cell phone.
source: http://news.qq.com/a/20080513/004283.htm

See similar cloud formation captured 20 minutes later in a different city, ~200km east of this location: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzVamN...
A map of the locations with sightings of very similar phenomenon.
http://img223.imageshack.us/img223/24...
More photos taken, reported 1 hr before the quake.:
http://shenyun.epochtimes.com/b5/8/5/...
These clouds seemed to be glowing or somewhat luminous and seemed to resemble some characteristics of the Auroras. I am not sure exactly what they were or whether they indeed had anything to do with the quake. I am no expert anyways. See if any scientists are willing to give a full explanation.
If such phenomenon can be proved for its connection with earthquake occurrences, maybe they could be used as warning signs and would be life saving. If not, just learn these clouds as yet another rare atmospheric phenomenon and no need to panic when seeing them.
After all, this might well be just a rare atmospheric phenomenon occurred by coincidence. Though, just wondering if there's any possibility the formation of such rare clouds be catalyzed by any event??
I guess some of you might find the following articles interesting.
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/2367
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB12112...
http://environment.newscientist.com/a...

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This is wonderfull!






These two photos were sent to me back in July of 2003 and was the first image I had seen of these remarkable rainbow effects in the clouds. It was taken by a friend of a friend and given to me to use in the investigation that Gale and I were doing on the "signs in the heavens" research.

These effects in our atmosphere are relatively new, only having shown up in the past few years.
You will not find them in the older books on atmospheric phenomena. We all know that it is a
water mist, or spray, rain, or ice crystals that can cause such beautiful sights. Gale and I suspect
that there is a whole lot more water / ice crystals now in our atmosphere than in the past. Why?

Yes, "signs in the heavens" is pretty much everything over one's head. (No pun intended) Night or day many have seen strange inexplicable things. UFOs would, of course, be one of those signs I propose. Even our aircraft could be classed in that category, same could be said for our space program.

no matter how or what makes them they always get an "Oh wow look at that" out of me. so many things that most people don't even notice I seem to find amazing..


I was out of town and while I was heading off to do errands the sky suddenly went form bright sunny sky to a strange dark ribbon of clouds moving fast across the sky. O_o Weird and scary, right? «I was out of town and while I was heading off to do errands the sky suddenly went form bright sunny sky to a strange dark ribbon of clouds moving fast across the sky. O_o Weird


Do some research on these lenticular clouds, , , , ,

This picture taken this afternoon from the pilot house window.

Yet they still don't want you to know that these are very new to mankind. They were never around in our youth unless you are only ten years old now.

Tucson Infralateral Arc and Circumscribed Halo


Parhelic Circle over the Dead Sea imaged by Koby Harati ( Photography site) on March 7, 2007. The camera is pointing straight upwards. The white parhelic circle passes through the sun and circles around sky, everywhere at the same altitude. The coloured halos at top right are fragments of a 22 degree halo, circumscribed arc and, on the parhelic circle, two sundogs. Had the sun been any higher the sundogs would not have formed.



These wonderfull photo's from Latvia, where sent to me from Zenbouy!


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Double Sun Dog Dazzles Icy Omaha



January 15, 2009—Like glowing parentheses, two sun dogs gave cold-bitten Omaha, Nebraska, residents a reason to go outside Wednesday.

Typically seen to the left and right of a low-lying sun, sun dogs, or parhelia, can take a number of forms—from slightly brighter segments of a solar halo (as shown) to rainbow-hued horizontal streaks to blinding spots nearly indistinguishable from the sun itself.

The sharpness, movement, and orientation of hexagonal, cloudborne ice crystals determine a sun dog's shape, sharpness, and color. Mottled, wobbling, or tall crystals, for example, generally result in more diffuse or colorful displays.

Despite Nebraska's subzero temperatures yesterday, sun dogs don't require cold ground temperatures. The atmospheric phenomena can be seen globally in any season—and even on other worlds. Eight-sided ammonia crystals above Jupiter and Saturn, for example, may spawn quadruple sun dogs, according to physicist Les Cowley on the

Circumzenithal arc, Atacama Desert, Chile. Imaged at the European Southern Observatory by Sylvain Rondi (site) on the morning of 21st March '02 when the sun was 22° high, the ideal altitude for CZAs. Image©2002 Sylvain Rondi, shown with permission.



A Lenticular Cloud Over New Zealand
Credit & Copyright: Chris Picking (Starry Night Skies Photography)

Lenticular Clouds Above Washington
Credit & Copyright: Tim Thompson
Explanation: Are those UFOs near that mountain? No -- they are multilayered lenticular clouds. Moist air forced to flow upward around mountain tops can create lenticular clouds. Water droplets condense from moist air cooled below the dew point, and clouds are opaque groups of water droplets. Waves in the air that would normally be seen horizontally can then be seen vertically, by the different levels where clouds form. On some days the city of Seattle, Washington, USA, is treated to an usual sky show when lenticular clouds form near Mt. Rainier, a large mountain that looms just under 100 kilometers southeast of the city. This image of a spectacular cluster of lenticular clouds was taken last December



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