Extremely bright cloud iridiscence in Spain

On Saturday, February 10, 2007, Ramón Baylina shot these photographs of incredibly bright and colouful iridescent clouds at the Port of Tarragona (Spain). The pictures were taken at about 5 pm with a 200-mm-zoom lens."

More pictures are here

Mountain Mirage in Germany

In December 2006, some very prominent inversions formed in Germany. On two days mirages were observed along these inversion layers.

In the morning of December 15, 2006, Rüdiger Manig could see the miraged Fichtelgebirge from the weather station at Neuhaus am Rennweg in Thuringia, which was situated directly above a sea of clouds when he made his observation. The distance between the Fichtelgebirge and Neuhaus am Rennweg is about 70 km. The photograph shows Mt Schneeberg (1053 m) on the left and Mt Ochsenkopf (1023 m) on the right.

On December 23, 2006, Stephan Rubach saw the Alps main ridge in a distance of more than a hundred km from Mt Grosser Arber (1456 m) in the Bavarian Forest. Also he stood above a sea of clouds when making his observation, and the layers of air of differnent temperatures let the peaks of the Alps grow upwards in an abstractly distorted way.

Winter Mirage in southern Finland

The image was taken by Timo Kuhmonen at last weekend, on Saturday 10th February 2007. Place is near to Helsinki / Finland (Lauttasaari).

Timo was outside on that day hiking and taking some winter weekend photos. He had seen the mirage above frozen sea, distant island was "floating" on the air.

Temperature on that morning at his house in Espoo was -20°C. At the place where photo was taken, temperature was higher. Propably there has been enough of temperature differences in the air layers to produce this "winter mirage".