Strange Skies
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Camera

Sun halo seen in St. Petersburg, Russia

Sun dogs over St. Petersburg
© Aivaras Ciurlionis
The two bright spots on either side of the sun are commonly referred to as sun dogs, mock suns or phantom suns, but the scientific name is parhelia. This natural wonder can be observed during especially cold weather, when light refracts from ice crystals floating in the air.

Residents of the northern capital of Russia and its outskirts captured a rare and mind-blowing natural phenomenon, which makes it appear as if our planet has three suns.

Sun

Sun dog solar phenomenon shines over Harbin, China

Sun dog over China
© CCTV+
The rare atmospheric 'sun dog' optical phenomenon, or parhelion, appeared in the sky above the northeast Chinese city of Harbin in Heilongjiang Province earlier this week.

The spectacle, which occurs along with the accumulation of ice crystals in the atmosphere, presents itself as a halo with the sun in the centre and two reflections on either side.

The three suns, which stunned local residents, are created when sunlight is refracted through regular hexagonal ice crystals, and only appear when atmospheric pressure is stable and there is adequate moisture in the air during a cold period of weather.

Blackbox

Mysterious enriched uranium particle detected in skies over Alaska's Aleutian Islands

Uranium particles detected
© Berliner Verlag / Global Look Press
Scientists have found a "highly unusual" particle enriched with uranium in the skies over Alaska's Aleutian Islands. The source of the substance, which is typically used in nuclear fuel and bombs, is still unclear.

The mysterious substance "containing a very small amount of enriched uranium" was found at an altitude of 7km (4.3 miles) above Alaska's Aleutian Islands, according to a report issued by the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity.

It is the first time the group of US scientists has detected enriched uranium-235 in their 20-year study. They were making no special attempt to sample radioactive material, when they came across it during a routine flight to check atmospheric conditions in August 2016.

"During 20 years of aircraft sampling of millions of particles in the global atmosphere, we have rarely encountered a particle with a similarly high content of 238U [uranium-238] and never a particle with enriched 235U [uranium-235]," an abstract from the article says, with the full study to be published in April.

Question

Enriched uranium found floating above Alaska

WB-57
© NASAA NASA WB-57 plane, like the one that located the mystery particle.
On 3 August 2016, 7km above Alaska's Aleutian Islands, a research plane captured something mysterious: An atmospheric aerosol particle enriched with the kind of uranium used in nuclear fuel and bombs.

It's the first time scientists have detected such a particle just floating along in the atmosphere in 20 years of plane-based observations.

Uranium is the heaviest element to occur naturally on Earth's surface in an appreciable amount. Normally it occurs as the slightly radioactive isotope uranium-238, but some amount of uranium-235, the kind humans make bombs and fuel out of, occurs in nature. Uranium-238 is already rare to find floating above the Earth in the atmosphere. But scientists have never before spotted enriched uranium, a sample uranium containing uranium-235, in millions of research plane-captured atmospheric particles.

"One of the main motivations of this paper is to see if somebody who knows more about uranium than any of us would understand the source of the particle," scientist Dan Murphy from NOAA told me. After all, "aerosol particles containing uranium enriched in uranium-235 are definitely not from a natural source," he writes in the paper, published recently in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity.

Murphy has led flights around the world sampling the atmosphere for aerosols. These tiny particles can come from polution, dust, fires and other sources, and can influence things such as cloud formation and the weather. The researchers spotted the mystery particle on a flight over Alaska using their "Particle Analysis by Laser Mass Spectrometry" instrument. They considered that perhaps the signature came from something weird, but evidence seems to point directly at enriched uranium.

Sun

'Truly magical' sun halo spotted over northern Sweden

Sun halo over Sweden
© Marit Aasvang Olsson
There was an incredible light phenomenon in far northern Sweden last week - and one woman was lucky enough to capture it on her phone.

It was like something from a dream.

At least that's how Marit Aasvang Olsson felt after she captured a "sun halo" on her camera phone.

The Norwegian woman, who lives in Malmberget around 100 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, said she was dropping her daughter off at school last week when she spotted the phenomenon in the sky.

Info

Major study finds mid-latitudes ozone layer not repairing as models predict

Ozone Layer
© NASA/Science Photo LibraryA coloured satellite map of atmospheric ozone in the southern hemisphere between mid-August and early October 1998. An ozone "hole" is seen over Antarctica.
Pointing to the recovery of the ozone layer as humanity's one great triumph of environmental remediation may have been premature, a new report warns.

A team led by Joanna Haigh of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, UK, has discovered that while ozone density is indeed improving at the poles, it is not doing so at lower latitudes, roughly between 60 degrees north and 60 degrees south.

That encompasses everywhere on the planet between the Shetland Islands off the north coast of Scotland to south of Tierra del Fuego at the foot of South America.

The researchers found that although the decrease in ozone concentration is not as great as that seen at the poles before the banning of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in 1987, the effects may be worse, because ultraviolet radiation is stronger in the region, and it contains most of the world's population.

Ozone is an inorganic molecule also known as trioxygen, or O3. It is present in low concentrations throughout the Earth's atmosphere, but is found in much larger levels in the stratosphere, about 20 to 30 kilometres above the planet's surface, where it is formed by the interaction of O2 with ultraviolet light from the sun.

Sun

Circumzenithal arc seen over New Plymouth, New Zealand

Circumzenithal arc in NZ
© Simon O'Connor/StuffThe circumzenithal arc, or smile in the sky, seen above the Wind Wand on Saturday afternoon.
It's known as a smile in the sky, and somebody up there must be happy because there were two grinning down on New Plymouth during Saturday afternoon.

The upside down rainbows - captured here above the Wind Wand by photographer Simon O'Connor - are officially known as circumzenithal arcs, or Bravais arcs.

They are formed by sunlight refracting off ice crystals in the air high above, rather than light hitting raindrops, which is what causes an ordinary rainbow.

According to Physics.org, upside down rainbows are more common in cold climates, but still fairly rare.

Binoculars

Rare moon dogs light up the skies over Winnipeg, Manitoba

Moon dogs over Winnipeg, Manitoba
© Scott McCulloughMoon dogs appeared in the Manitoba sky early Thursday morning.
Winnipeggers were treated to a relatively rare sight in the inky sky early Thursday before sunrise.

Bright spots, known as moon dogs, were visible on both sides of a halo that ringed the moon.

The lunar halo and spots only happen when there are ice crystals in the air and the moon is bright enough - quarter moon or more - to shine light that can be refracted by the crystals, according to The Stargazer's Guide to the Night Sky.


Moon

Double moon halo seen over Hampton, New Hampshire

A 22-degree lunar halo, with a 9-degree lunar halo inside it
Moon halo  over NH
© Josh Blash
This photo - taken January 28, 2018, by Josh Blash in Hampton, New Hampshire - shows what's called a halo around the moon. These sorts of halos are made by ice crystals in the upper air. In fact, there are two halos here, with the outer one being the common 22-degree halo, whose image we see several times each day in photos sent in by people around the world. The inner halo is more rare. We asked sky optics guru Les Cowley of the website Atmospheric Optics about the inner halo, and he said:

Cloud Grey

Stunning iridescent cloud captured over Ribeirao Claro, Brazil (VIDEO)

Rainbow cloud over Brazil
© Andre NassifThe meteorological phenomenon, known as cloud iridescence, was seen above Ribeirao Claro, Brazil.
Stunning video captured a rainbow in the clouds over Ribeirao Claro, Brazil, in a meteorological phenomenon known as cloud iridescence.

Iridescence like this happens when the clouds are very thin and are made of similar-sized water droplets.

What you're seeing, essentially, is part of a corona -- when a rainbow-like halo engulfs the sun or the moon -- and the bands and colors change as the cloud evolves.

Iridescence is most often seen close to the sun.

It's usually spotted when part of a cloud is forming because that's when all of the water droplets have a similar history and similar size.


Comment: A few days ago spectacular polar stratospheric clouds were captured over Peru. It is likely that atmospheric dust loading from increased comet and volcanic activity is contributing to the 'strange skies' we are witnessing, the cooling effect of which causes ice crystals to form. See also: Electric universe theory provides rational, intelligible explanations for such atmospheric phenomena as ball lightning, plasma discharges, noctilucent clouds, lightning, hurricanes and tornadoes. For more information on this and much more read, Earth Changes and the Human-Cosmic Connection by Pierre Lescaudron and Laura Knight-Jadczyk.