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Blogs > loveisamyth > loveisamyth, stars are forever


loveisamyth 68M
849 posts
11/26/2015 5:32 am

Last Read:
11/27/2015 9:07 am
THANKSGIVING SKIES (UPDATED)
Thanksgiving is the biggest travel holiday of the year in the United States. Millions of people board airplanes and fly long hours to visit friends and family. Dreading the trip? Think of it as a sky watching opportunity. There are some things you can see only through the window of an airplane, like this.



This is called "the glory"--a bulls-eye of softly colored rings surrounding the shadow of the airplane cast on cloud tops.

The picture shown above was taken by pilot and Spaceweather reader Ulrich Beinert. "The glory is always centered on the photographer's position in the plane," Beinert notes. "In my case it was around the cockpit." When passengers see the glory, however, the body of the plane is in the bulls-eye.



Atmospheric optics expert Les Cowley explains the phenomenon: "The rings are formed when light is scattered backwards by individual water droplets in the clouds. The more uniform the size of the droplets, the more rings you will see. They swell and contract as you travel over clouds with smaller or larger droplets."

In this article, Cowley describes even more things you can see through the airplane window.

Turns out, space weather balloons are another good vehicle for observing the glory. This specimen was photographed on Nov. 21st by an Earth to Sky Calculus balloon descending over Sebago Lake, Maine



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