Strange Skies
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Rainbow

Beautiful circumzenithal arc photographed over Raleigh, North Carolina

Elizabeth Gardner
WRAL
Thu, 28 Nov 2019 20:41 UTC
Circumzenithal arc over Raleigh, NC
© Susan Bagwell
On Sunday, Susan Bagwell sent WRAL a beautiful image of what appears to be an upside down rainbow.

It appears to be an upside down rainbow, but it's not formed in the same way as a rainbow. It's called a circumzenithal arc and is caused by the refraction of sunlight through ice crystals in the upper atmosphere.

It's similar to a halo around the sun or moon.

To see a circumzenithal arc, the sun has to be at about 22 degrees above the horizon. This happens more often in colder months when the sun's angle is lower and we are more likely to see a mostly clear sky with cirrus clouds.
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Rainbow

Rare sky-high rainbow halo snapped in Lower Hutt, New Zealand

Dan Satherley
News Hub
Fri, 22 Nov 2019 21:46 UTC
Sun halo over NZ
© Kaila Kahui-Grosvenor
A high school student in Lower Hutt has captured impressive photographs of a rainbow halo around the sun.

Sacred Heart College student Kaila Kahui-Grosvenor snapped the pics during lunchtime on Thursday.

"I saw this crazy looking halo around the sun and thought it looked pretty cool," she told Newshub. "A teacher said it was from the Australian fires."

WeatherWatch forecaster Philip Duncan told Newshub halos like these are usually caused by ice crystals very high up in the atmosphere - over 10km.

"The fine ice crystal behaves like mist so when the sun hits it, it refracts and reflects the light making a halo or rainbow around the sun and moon."

But he wouldn't rule out the Australian bushfires having an influence.

"The bush fires probably didn't create this, but I do admit our atmosphere is probably a little dirtier at the moment so I couldn't 100 percent rule it out."

Comment: See also:

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Cassiopaea

Astronomers capture brightest light ever detected, a mysterious gamma-ray burst that has smashed records

Maddie Bender
Vice
Wed, 20 Nov 2019 18:49 UTC
Gamma-Ray burst.
© GettyArtist's depiction of a Gamma-Ray burst.
For the first time, astrophysicists have observed a cosmic explosion emit particles that are a trillion times more energetic than visible light, a record-setting measurement from a phenomenon that scientists are still seeking to fully understand.

The observation of this powerful gamma-ray burst (GRB), as these explosions are known, adds another layer to what scientists think happens when a star implodes. The findings were published on November 20 in two papers in the journal Nature.

When a star dies, its insides no longer support its own mass, and it crashes upon itself. This self-collision compresses the star's core into a neutron star or a black hole, while generating explosions that produce a supernova. These explosions are GRBs, and they produce short-lived jets of extremely energetic light. GRBs may also occur when two neutron stars collide. They happen on a daily basis, and release as much energy in a few seconds as our Sun will emit in its entire 10 billion years of life. Until now, however, no telescope had observed a GRB emit photons (light particles) on the order of a teraelectronvolt, or TeV.

"Such a strong signal has never been measured in ground-based gamma ray astronomy — this is the first time," said Razmik Mirzoyan, the spokesperson and senior astrophysicist of the MAGIC collaboration, the group that manages the telescopes that made the observation.


Comment: Why? We'll be getting a clear answer soon enough, judging by the rate at which civilization-ending asteroids are daily careening past us...

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Moon

Cooling atmosphere: Moon halo captured over Austin, Texas

Kristen Currie
KXAN
Sun, 17 Nov 2019 20:12 UTC
Moon halo over Austin, TX
© Nick Rober
On Saturday evening, KXAN viewer Nick Rober captured this image. If you look closely, there is a very faint ring around the moon.

What is it?

The ring is referred to as a '22-degree halo' and appears as a light circle around the sun or moon. Why the name? The circle has a radius of ~22°.

What causes it?

Thin, high clouds called 'cirrus clouds' are made up of millions of tiny ice crystals thousands of feet in the atmosphere. Light reflecting off the moon or shining from the sun is refracted, which then creates a visible ring surrounding the sun/moon.

In-Depth: Refraction of light is defined as the bending or splitting of light through a medium. In this case, the light is being bent by the ice crystals in the air that make up the cloud.
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UFO

UFOs or satellites? A string of lights freak Hawaiians out


Sputnik
Thu, 14 Nov 2019 21:37 UTC
UFO or satellite
© Hawaii News Now/Clau LazHawaiian residents statewide see strings of lights in the sky for the second night in a row.
For the second night in a row, the skies over Hawaii have been lit up by a string of mysterious objects shimmering in the dark, many residents reported. Although a local outlet contacted the Federal Aviation Administration, there has been no official explanation yet.

Locals in Hawaii have reported en masse that mysterious near-perfectly ordered lights returned to the night sky after they first appeared the night before, Hawaii News Now has revealed.
"I was jumping up and down, freaking out like, 'What is that? What is that?' It was pretty weird. I couldn't make any sense of it", Kala Holiday told the outlet, while another viewer spoke about 20 to 25 lights "that resembled a Roman candle shot across the sky".

Comment: In the absence of official confirmation or denial from SpaceX, or any other official body, and given a hint of thought engineering, one has to wonder exactly what is going on.

When some of Elon Musk's other projects are taken into consideration, thought engineering in regards to the subject of UFO's doesn't seem too wide of the mark. Additionally, the SpaceX Starlink program is for deploying the worlds most advanced broadband internet system. The question then becomes, is the SpaceX program an elaborate attempt to hide the UFO phenomenon or is it the cause of the recent observations? Time will tell, however one lesson from the Wizard of Oz is that no expense is spared in the creation of elaborate illusions.

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Cloud Grey

Hole punch cloud observed over North Carolina

Mark Price
Fresno Bee
Mon, 11 Nov 2019 10:32 UTC
hole punch cloud in NC
© PHIL LAMBERT/WBTVWhat is this? The photo was taken on Old Mountain Road in Iredell County. Several images of the same thing have appeared on Facebook.
Images showing a mysterious circular gap that appeared in the clouds over a North Carolina highway have ignited a scramble for explanations on social media, including the possibility it was created by a UFO.

North Carolina TV station WBTV was the first to post a photo on Monday, with an explanation that viewer Phil Lambert of Lenoir submitted the photo taken on Old Mountain Road in Iredell County.

The photo shows what appears to be a near perfect circle in the clouds.

Not long after, photos from other people began to appear on Facebook, with some commenting — perhaps tongue-in-cheek — that the shape was not unlike the gap that might be left by a descending flying saucer ... or a cloaked USS Enterprise (a Star Trek reference.)

"ALIENS!" wrote Dan Ciaccio on Facebook.

"Wow! Looks like a scene from Independence Day!," posted Jennifer Brady Ellis, referring to the 1996 alien invasion movie.

Comment: In March this year residents in the United Arab Emirates spotted a 'rare' hole punch or fallstreak cloud, the first there in a decade.

Observations globally of this cloud phenomena are increasing. In recent times other sightings have appeared over Canada, Southern California, UK, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

Other strange cloud anomalies also seem to be appearing world-wide with higher frequency and intensity. Factors which may contribute to these 'strange skies' are atmospheric dust loading from increased comet and volcanic activity and changes in the layers of the atmosphere. See also:

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Cloud Grey

Incredible iridescent cloud filmed over Trinidad

Emma Parker
Daily Star
Sun, 03 Nov 2019 08:31 UTC
Iridescent cloud over Trinidad
© PLANET X NEWS/Youtube)
A mysterious cloud spotted above Trinidad has been dubbed a "volcano in the sky" by baffled onlookers.

Villagers were perplexed by the colourful anomaly that turned the sky an iridescent pinky-purple in the town of Tunapuna.

The weather formation appears to be motionless between the clouds and occasionally disappears.

Footage of the floating hue appeared online as witnesses captured it in awe.

The phenomena has left thousands guessing after the video was posted to a popular conspiracy Reddit forum.

Superstitious internet users have said the mass could be the "beginning of the end of the world" while others branded it "heaven on earth."

Others said the unusual light looks as though it is a "volcano in the sky."


Comment: The growing list of phenomena resulting from our changing atmosphere:

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Info

New class of black holes discovered by scientist

Laura Arenschield
Ohio State University
Thu, 31 Oct 2019 17:27 UTC
Black Hole
© Ohio State image by Jason ShultsAn artist's rendering of the black hole astrophysicists identified in this study. The black hole (bottom left) is seen near a red giant star. The discovery shows there may be an entire class of black holes astronomers did not know existed.
Black holes are an important part of how astrophysicists make sense of the universe - so important that scientists have been trying to build a census of all the black holes in the Milky Way galaxy.

But new research shows that their search might have been missing an entire class of black holes that they didn't know existed.

In a study published today in the journal Science, astronomers offer a new way to search for black holes, and show that it is possible there is a class of black holes smaller than the smallest known black holes in the universe.

"We're showing this hint that there is another population out there that we have yet to really probe in the search for black holes," said Todd Thompson, a professor of astronomy at The Ohio State University and lead author of the study.

"People are trying to understand supernova explosions, how supermassive black stars explode, how the elements were formed in supermassive stars. So if we could reveal a new population of black holes, it would tell us more about which stars explode, which don't, which form black holes, which form neutron stars. It opens up a new area of study."
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Attention

Possible nova in constellation Scutum

Ernesto Guido
Remanzacco Blogspot
Thu, 31 Oct 2019 17:40 UTC
Nova in Scutum_1
© Remanzacco Blogspot
Following the posting on the Central Bureau's Transient Object Confirmation Page about a possible Nova in Scutum (TOCP Designation: PNV J18395972-1025415) I performed some follow-up of this object through a TEL 0.6-m f/6.5 astrograph + CCD located in the El Sauce Observatory in Chile and operated by Telescope Live network.

On images taken on October 31.01, 2019 I can confirm the presence of an optical counterpart with R-filtered CCD magnitude about +8.4 (saturated in a 10-second exposure) at coordinates:

R.A. = 18 39 59.71, Decl.= -10 25 41.9

(equinox 2000.0; Gaia DR2 catalogue reference stars for the astrometry).

This transient was discovered (discovered magnitude 11.5 g-Sloan Filter) by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) on 2019 Oct. 29 at 01:12UT and reported to Transient Name Server (TNS) on Oct. 29 at 02:07:49 UTC as ASASSN-19aad = AT 2019tpb. According to CBET 4690, several independents discoveries have been reported to the Central Bureau of a nova in Scutum: Koichi Nishiyama (unfiltered magnitude 9.4 on Oct. 29.397), Hideo Nishimura (unfiltered magnitude 9.8 on Oct. 29.421), Shizuo Kaneko (unfiltered magnitude 9.8 on Oct. 29.462) (on AAVSO VSX is reported also Fujio Kabashima as independent discoverer).

Spectroscopy by S. C. Williams et al. (see ATel #13241) & by M. Pavana et al. (see ATel #13245) show that AT 2019tpb/ASASSN-19aad is a Galactic nova in the early stages of eruption.
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Rainbow

Circumzenithal arc snapped in skies above Prestatyn, Wales

Suzanne Kendrick
Rhyl, Prestatyn & Abergele Journal
Sat, 26 Oct 2019 01:27 UTC
Circumzenithal arc over Prestatyn, Wales
© Stuart Prince
This rare upside-down rainbow was snapped in the skies over Prestatyn by aviation photographer Stuart Prince.

The circumzenithal arc, sometimes known as Bravais' arc, is a type of Halo.

Stuart, 50, said: "It is rarely seen as the conditions have to be just right and is formed when light reflects off ice crystals."

Stuart, who photographs aircraft around the world - including North Korea - added: "It was such a beautiful sky that afternoon. I looked up and was amazed to see the smile in the sky overhead.

"I was just about to walk my boxer dog Ben to Prestatyn beach when i saw the arc."
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