Mother-of-pearl clouds over Colorado?

Caleb Jones took this photo in Estes Park, Colorado (USA) on 28 October, around 3:10pm local time. The weather had been mostly clear on this day. These clouds were relatively far from the sun, and the vivid iridescent colors seem to be caused by very small droplets that polar stratospheric clouds have. But the edges of the wave cloud look more like regular mid-level waveclouds.

The 00 UTC 29 October sounding of Denver doesn't show unusually strong winds at high altitude, at 40 to 50 kts from the NW. In fact the entire troposphere seems rather dry on that particular sounding for lenticular clouds to occur.

I do not think this was caused by a missile launch either, considering the lenticular shape of the clouds.

I am wondering if these could be stratospheric clouds, or just some quite unusual appearance of lenticular mountain wave clouds. I received another report from someone else in Colorado who also took images, and am waiting for her approval to post them here as well.

Brigitte Rauch and her husband spend every free minute on their motor-boat on the waters around their home island Helgoland, whichis only about one square km large and situated in the open North Sea. If possible, they do not miss any sunset and always have their camera ready to hand. This photograph of reflections on the water surface was taken on July 17, 2006, just after sunset. The colour of the sky and the clouds are reflected from the water surface, which was relatively smooth that evening. The patterns are caused by small waves. This richly coloured interplay of sky, clouds and waves can be seen only on a few days of the year.

More pictures: 1 2 3 4

Tunnel Glory in Italy

Gerald Berthold spent the beginning of October in the South Tyrol, Italy. On 5th October 2006 he climbed the 2778m high Piccolo Lagazuio. The descent leads partly through tunnels dating to the First World War. Where they breakthrough the mountainside they give fantastic views of the Dolomites. On one of these galleries the sun shone along the tunnel through fog which developed because the humidity and lower temperature inside. In this formed a spectre of the Brocken with a spectacular multiple ringed glory (the camera is pointing away from the sunlight direction). The glory seemed almost graspable and was sensationally bright.

Small coronas from bacterial film on water surface

Most of the cultivation pools in my room are now showing much smaller coronas than earlier. In each pool the corona is of constant size over the whole bacterial film surface, but from pool to pool their size vary.

Even though these coronas are smaller than before, they still are large as compared to pollen coronas. Unfortunately I have no photos for comparison.

In the composite image are two coronas photographed with same lens (not to scale with upper single image, which has been taken with zoom lens). The microphotograph of the bacterial film is from the smaller corona on the left.

The light source was a 50 W halogen spotlight that I made even more concentrated by placing the lamp in a cardboard box, into which a small hole was made for light to come through. When taking photos, the room was otherwise darkened.

Artificial Spectre in Brocken Mountains

This artificial Spectre of Brocken with fogbow was taken April 14, 2003 in the Brocken Mountains in central Germany. A helium lamp, positioned behind the photographer, was used to illuminate this very thick fog layer - the visibilty was less than about 5 m. The great size of the Brocken Spectre results from the shadow not lying in one plane but rather extending over a depth of several metres.

A camera team made a film [40MB, for WINDVD, in German!] about search of the Spectre and the edge Ghost but unfortunately the quality of digital version is not very good.

Spooky greetings from the ghost heaven!!!

Divergent Light Rainbow

On the evening of October 7 the weather was windy and rainy. I went out to take photos of rainbow using very powerfull light source. The shaft of light is narrow, but it illuminates buildings that are more than one kilometer away. The distance from the photographing spot to light source was about 150 meters. On October 10 I took photos of fogbow. It was amazingly bright and seemed to show up better closer to the light source.

Reflectet Light Rainbow

Uwe Mueller from Bremerhaven photographed this reflected light rainbow at the 06/10/04. The reflector surface is with large probability the transatlantic harbor at the external Weser, which was at the time of the admission behind the observer. This rainbow was visibly of 15.45 UT- 15,54 UT. At the beginning of the sifting the reflected light rainbow was good visible. It became then fast weaker.

Primary, Secondary and Interference Rainbow

Mike Nicholson took this shot just after sunup on Sept 7 2006 last. He has to enhance it in PhotoShop Elements 4.0 so the colour is a bit overdone. It was shot on a Pentax *ist DS, 18-55mm lens set to 20mm. ISO was on auto (probably 200), 1/250 sec f/8. A circular polarizer was used.
Location: Papatoetoe, Auckland, New Zealand.

Interference arc outside of secondary 9-28-06

I was outside watching small rainshowers come and go and later on as the sun came out I got small rainbow fragments here and there. Later on while helping my mother take care of the farm animals another strong rainbow formed and this one was unusual because I counted 4 supernummery arcs inside the main bow and I could also see a very well-defined supernummery outside the secondary bow. I enhance both macro images made of the two bows. The USM of the primary shows 5 supernummeries.