Rainbows are normally red, yellow, green and blue--in short, all the colors of a rainbow. But the towering rainbow Jan Koeman photographed from Kloetinge, the Netherlands, on Feb. 18th was simply red:
"I have never seen such a rainbow before," says Koeman. "It appeared just a few minutes after a red sunrise."

What made the rainbow red? It was only color available. All of the other colors of the rainbow had been scattered away by air molecules and dust particles in front of the low-hanging sun.

Koeman notes another puzzle: Rainbows require raindrops, "but it was not raining at all!" he says. Atmospheric optics expert Les Cowley thinks the raindrops were there, in the distance. "There could be rain on the horizon or virga. Virga is cloud precipitation that does not reach the ground," says Cowley.

Red rainbows are more common than you might think. They appear with frequency at sunrise or sunset, all around the world. More examples may be found in the realtime photo gallery.

Rare sundogs accompanied by a reverse rainbow stunned residents of Calama and Antofagasta, Chile on February 17, 2016.

As if the parhelia was smiling at us from the sky.

So we have seen three different kinds of atmospheric phenomena in these pictures... Sundogs or parhelia which consists of a pair of bright spots on either side on the Sun. Circumzenithal arc which is an optical phenomenon similar in appearance to a reverse rainbow. And finally a circumhorizontal arc which in its full form appear like a large, brightly spectrum-coloured band running parallel to the horizon, located below the Sun or Moon.

All these sky phenomena are members of a large family of halos, created by light interacting with ice crystals or rain in the atmosphere.

Residents in Harrison Township, Michigan, got a rude surprise on Sunday when they awoke to find a strange oily substance coating their cars and homes.

Days later, what the substance is and where it came from remain a mystery.

"Everybody's concerned," Harrison Township resident Paul Schlutow, 73, told ABC News today, adding that his major concern is finding out if the substance is harmful.

Schlutow said he contacted several organizations on Tuesday morning, including the local fire department, the Department of Environmental Quality and even the nearby Selfridge Air National Guard Base.

Mother Nature has treated residents in the Orangeville area to a relatively uncommon atmospheric phenomenon only seen a few times every year.

After a band of snow squalls moved through Dufferin County last night, the skies cleared to reveal a parhelion — informally nicknamed a sun dog — near Mono early Saturday morning (Feb. 13).

Local photographer Rose Knott managed to capture an image of the uncommon occurrence early Saturday morning.

"I've never seen a sun dog. It was just so exciting to me," she posted on Facebook. "Just felt so thrilled to capture this."

Sun dogs are formed when sunlight refracts off ice crystals in the atmosphere, creating bright spots on either side of the sun. In some cases, a rainbow-shaped halo can be seen connecting these bright pillars beside the sun.

"It is more the ice crystals high up in the atmosphere that create the phenomena," Environment Canada meteorologist Geoff Coulson told The Banner last year. "When those ice crystals reflect the sunlight at a certain angle, it can form these sun dogs."

Cold air isn't a preamble to a sundog, as Coulson said they could appear pretty much year round. They usually occur in the morning when the sun is rising or when it is setting in the evening.

"What you're really looking for is relatively cloud free conditions," Coulson said. "To be able to view it, you really would had to be within sort of the breaks in the flurry activity to actually see the sun and the phenomena itself."

Residents across Caledon were looking to the skies Thursday morning (Feb. 11) as a unique 'sun dog' cast a spherical glow on the landscape.

"It certainly was a beautiful sight this morning, wasn't it?" local resident, Lori Makarewicz said to The Enterprise. "I have never seen one like that before. I almost got frostbite by standing out in my sandals on the front lawn, didn't want to waste any time looking for my boots in case I missed it!"

According to Environment Canada meteorologist, Rebecca Wagner, "sun dogs" which are also classified as parhelion, halos, or "mock suns," are an optical effect caused by the refraction of sunlight by ice crystals in the atmosphere.

"In particular this morning we had a very well developed halo around the sun with two bands with bright spots on either side of the sun, at about the same elevation," she continued.

While they technically occur any time of the year, sun dogs appear more vividly in the winter due to the combination of ice crystals in the atmosphere and the low angle of the sun in the sky - and even still, are usually only spotted about two to three times a year.

As the sun rises in the sky, the halo diminishes as the angle of the light hitting the ice crystals changing.
Bolton resident, Craig Kellough, spotted the unique optical effect over the North Hill of town.

"I was driving into Bolton around 9 a.m. when I saw this spectacular scene in the sky surrounding the sun," he said. "I had to pull over and take as many shots as I could. It was something I had never seen before."

According to Wagner, with the chilly temperatures and clear skies predicted for this weekend, there might be another in store for those who missed Thursday morning's display.

Breanna Binder, a University of Washington postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Astronomy and lecturer in the School of STEM at UW Bothell, spends her days pondering X-rays.

As she and her colleagues report in a new paper published Feb. 12 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, they recently solved a mystery involving X-rays — a case of X-rays present when they shouldn't have been. This mystery's unusual main character — a star that is pretending to be a supernova — illustrates the importance of being in the right place at the right time.

Such was the case in May 2010 when an amateur South African astronomer pointed his telescope toward NGC300, a nearby galaxy. He discovered what appeared to be a supernova — a massive star ending its life in a blaze of glory.

"Most supernovae are visible for a short time and then — over a matter of weeks — fade from view," said Binder.

After a star explodes as a supernova, it usually leaves behind either a black hole or what's called a neutron star — the collapsed, high-density core of the former star. Neither should be visible to Earth after a few weeks. But this supernova — SN 2010da — still was.

"SN 2010da is what we call a 'supernova impostor' — something initially thought to be a supernova based on a bright emission of light, but later to be shown as a massive star that for some reason is showing this enormous flare of activity," said Binder.

Many supernova impostors appear to be massive stars in a binary system — two stars in orbit of one another. Stellar astrophysicists think that the impostor's occasional flare-ups might be due to perturbations from its neighbor.

For SN 2010da, the story appeared to be over until September 2010 — four months after it was confirmed as an impostor — when Binder pointed NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory toward NGC300 and found something unexpected.

"There was just this massive amount of X-rays coming from SN 2010da, which you should not see coming from a supernova impostor," she said.

The glowing region in this new image from the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope is a reflection nebula known as IC 2631. These objects are clouds of cosmic dust that reflect light from a nearby star into space, creating a stunning light show like the one captured here. IC 2631 is the brightest nebula in the Chamaeleon Complex, a large region of gas and dust clouds that harbours numerous newborn and still-forming stars. The complex lies about 500 light-years away in the southern constellation of Chamaeleon.

IC 2631 is illuminated by the star HD 97300, one of the youngest — as well as most massive and brightest — stars in its neighbourhood. This region is full of star-making material, which is made evident by the presence of dark nebulae noticeable above and below IC 2631 in this picture. Dark nebulae are so dense with gas and dust that they prevent the passage of background starlight.

Our Milky Way may be beautiful, but it sure can ruin our view of the cosmos.

Now, astronomers have just taken a peek behind the mess of stars and dust to find a veritable galactic zoo in a previously unexplored region of space. But we're not talking about just one or two galaxies; researchers have applied a new survey technique using the Australia-based Parkes radio telescope to find hundreds of undiscovered galaxies.

"The Milky Way is very beautiful of course and it's very interesting to study our own galaxy but it completely blocks out the view of the more distant galaxies behind it," said Lister Staveley-Smith, of The University of Western Australia and International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR).

A total of 883 galaxies have been identified within 250 million light-years from Earth, a third of which have never been seen before. They are all located in the "Zone of Avoidance", a region of space usually inaccessible to telescopes beyond the Milky Way's galactic bulge.

Social media has been flooded with apocalyptic pictures of the Indian city of Mumbai after a massive toxic fire broke out at a nine-story-high local dumping ground. For the second week, fumes have covered buildings and forced motorists to drive in thick smog.

The fire started at Deonar dumping ground in Mumbai on January 27. Since then, local residents have been complaining of eye irritation, breathlessness and coughing.

"My elder child, who is in class 3, has been feeling nauseous every morning for the past four days, owing to the heavy smog. He has a bad cough and has missed school," Mumbai resident Gunjal Chattree told the Hindustan Times.

Vikram Vishwanath, who lives close to Deonar, has stopped sending his son to school.

"My six-year-old has been having a lot of trouble breathing since the fire broke out at the dumping ground. We took him to an ENT specialist and he is on medication," he said.

For the past week, sky watchers in the UK have witnessed a rare apparition of polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs). Normally restricted to the Arctic Circle, the fantastically colorful clouds have appeared over the British Isles almost every day since Jan. 31st. Colin Fraser photographed the display over Edinburgh, Scotland, on Feb. 2nd:
PSCs form in the lower stratosphere when temperatures drop to a staggeringly-cold -85ºC. High-altitude sunlight shining through tiny ice particles ~10µm wide produce bright iridescent colors by diffraction and interference.

But there is more to PSCs than ice. Some polar stratospheric clouds contain very small droplets of naturally occurring nitric and sulphuric acids. These droplets destroy ozone. Indeed, atmospheric optics expert Les Cowley points out that a temporary ozone hole has formed over Ireland and the UK. It is the blue patch in this Feb. 1st ozone map from NASA's Arctic Ozone Watch: