Fireworks corona

Wolfgang and I spend New Year's Eve 2 years ago on the top of the Wendelstein Mountain. 100m lower down was the "Wendelsteinhaus" tavern with a party in full swing. After midnight the party fireworks detonated at our level in front of our eyes. The flares illuminated some fog patches from the valley and produced greenish and brownish coronas. Some of the original flares could have been green but the effect could also be due to scattering from the firework smoke particles. We wish you all a wonderful New Year and hope that you see this and plenty more atmospheric optics phenomena in 2007.

Mother-of-pearl clouds in Finland

A period of westerly tropospheric flows in Scandinavia is continuing to provide occasions of Mother-of-pearl (MoP) clouds to Finnish observers. Several MoP displays have been observed just before the Christmas at different locations, in particular in Central and Northern parts of Finland, but also at the Southern coast. The photograph taken by Mauri Laitinen in Kuopio, Eastern Finland, shows the beautifully coloured details of the afternoon display of 23rd December.

MoP clouds are seen a number of times each winter in Finland, but displays as bright as this one are fairly rare.
Usually the MoP clouds are related to stratospheric temperature colder than -80°C.

Alien hunt on the lake Königssee in Bavaria/Germany

October 13th 2006 was a sunny and very warm autumn day, which we wanted to spend on a hike at the Königssee. However, we did not get very far because the scene over the very cold, deeply shielded mountain lake was entrancing. Ships flew over the water, islands floated in the air and aliens over the lake were hunted. It was really fascinating to pursue the fast changing mirages.

More Pictures: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Wendelstein Shadow and Rainbow

After the passage of a front on August 12, 2006, the sky over Bavaria (Germany) began to clear up and turned into a sunny mood about 30 minutes before sunset. This image by Christoph Ries was taken looking toward the antisolar point as Mt. Wendelstein's (1,838 m or 6,030 ft) triangular shadow emerged over the Wildalpjoch Mountains (background). Both ends of this amazing rainbow were visible. By clicking on the image, you may be able to detect the faint left portion of the bow. Note that because the image was taken at altitude, the bow's nearly circular composition is observed. From flat terrain, we see rainbows as semi-circles, but when not confined by a horizon, it's easy to see that they're actually rain-circles. The image was stitched from three individual images using "autostitch" and "The Gimp."

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.