More than 700 lightning strikes lit up the stormy sky over Auckland during a violent thunderstorm yesterday evening.

MetService duty forecaster Tuporo Marsters said the city was struck by 701 flashes and rocked by loud, rolling thunderclaps.

The dangerous storm swept across the city at rush hour, grounding flights, flooding homes and shops, and leaving roads knee-deep in water.

Spectacular footage has also emerged on social media capturing the moment a lightning fork struck the top of the city's tallest building.

Night clouds can be seen in about an hour after sunset, said the head of the Hydrometeorological Center of Russia

Unusual noctilucent clouds can be seen in the night sky over Moscow. This was announced on Wednesday TASS director of the Hydrometeorological Center of Russia Roman Vilfand.

He noted that this phenomenon is a beautiful decoration in Summer sky. Such clouds can be observed on 4 and 5 July in the clear sky at night.

"These clouds are visible at night, they are often also called nocturnal clouds They are silvery and beautifully lit at night. When the sun sets, its rays penetrate deep into the atmosphere, penetrating it with light." - Vilfand said.

According to him, the noctilucent clouds are a cluster of molecules of water vapor. "These clouds are very high, at a distance of about 100 km from the surface of the Earth. To predict their occurrence can not be because we do not understand their nature. They appear in the summer, and the nature of these clouds is not fully known..." said Vilfand.

The colours in the sky never cease to amaze me; from cool sunrises to brilliant sunsets, to rainbows and halos around the sun.

Karen Butler of Nanaimo snapped a few pictures of bright colours dancing across the clouds a few days ago, the result of a circumhorizon arc.
A circumhorizon arc is a halo of sorts, and it appears when the sun is very high in the sky - higher than 58°. It's typically oriented parallel to the horizon. Often it's only visible in fragments when cirrus clouds aloft are lit with a rainbow of colours. The colours are the result of sunlight passing through the ice crystals that make up the cirrus cloud. The crystals themselves act like a prism, essentially splitting the sunlight into the spectrum of colours.

They glow in the dead of the night when everything should be dark.

And this weekend the region got a spectacular, if slightly eerie view of them.

Noctilucent clouds (the Latin name that basically translates to 'night shining') are a strange phenomena in the upper atmosphere.

You can only see them during the summer.

They are formed from small ice crystals so high up that they are still catching the sun even though, for those of us on the ground, it has set.

This incredible footage shows a Boeing 787 Dreamliner create a giant cloud of vapour trail as it soars through the skies over Russia.

The amazing video, filmed from another plane, shows the contrail forming 33,000 feet in the air.

The passenger who shot the video wrote online: 'This contrail looks dark against the rising sun.'

Vapour trails occur when areas of low pressure form around the edge of the wing, creating vortices - tubes of circulating air - that leave trails behind the wing's tips.

The low pressure in these areas mean that cold air can condense, leaving spectacular trails of water or even ice behind the plane.

At around 10am today, Bangkok witnessed a sun halo, a phenomenon in which a full 360 degree rainbow is seen encircling the sun.

Netizens tweeted pictures of the beautiful rainbow from many corners of Bangkok this morning.

Tuesday evening not only brought a gorgeous sunset, but also a rather peculiar looking cloud that piqued the interest of several residents out enjoying the evening.

(Tuesday) night just before sunset at our house in Shoreline..., I noticed that there was this very dramatic line of clouds across the entire sky from west to east, with the sky covered in clouds to the south of the line," wrote Jerry Erickson. "To the north of the clouds it was clear. Later the cloud formation moved to the south. I have never seen something like this before with such a clean edge of clouds.

Indeed you can in photos the dramatic edge to the clouds. What was up?

This brilliant display of lights looks like it came from the North Pole, but it was actually shot in Malaysia.

Last Thursday, a group of photographers were out on a trek to capture shots of the Milky Way, when they were surprised by these light pillars.

The multicoloured light pillars are a natural phenomenon that occurs when light reflects off the mirror-like surfaces of ice crystals. They are usually found in the polar regions, but have appeared at lower latitudes before.

Photographer Andrew Tan, was with a group of 11 at the northernmost tip of Sabah, Borneo. He told Mashable he only realised the light pillars were in the picture when he checked his camera later.

He used a 30-second long exposure to capture the phenomenon, and it picked up the colours of the light pillars. "It was magnificent," Tan told Malaysian paper The Star. "It is definitely a moment to treasure in our lives."

Ancient myths all begin with the creation of Venus out of Jupiter as Aditi (Rigveda), Osiris (Egyptian), Pallas Athene (Greek), Minerva and Venus (Roman) and Quetzalcoatl (Mayan, Mesoamerican). The impact on Jupiter out of which proto-Venus was born, was seen by every creature on Earth some 6,000 years BP because the entire Earth 'cried out'. The implications of this single event are: ⁽¹⁾ The impact generated an enormous pulse of gravitation radiation that effected the Earth and the reflection of that energy from local dust is what is currently thought to be the CMB; ⁽²⁾ Jupiter is a solid low density, planet comprising the currently accepted solar system elemental abundances; ⁽³⁾ The terrestrial planets were each born on out of similar impacts on Jupiter and each has a unique age; ⁽⁴⁾ The original solar system comprised only the giant planets; ⁽⁵⁾ The currently unexplained excess luminosity of Jupiter and the high temperature of Venus' surface 872 F (467 C) are the result of this impact.

The original solar system comprised only the giant planets which incorporated greatly enhanced concentrations of deuterium. Deuterium enhancements of 10¹⁰ observed in Large Dark Nebulae (LDN) and heavy elements detected by Galileo (C, O, S, Ar, Kr and Xe) suggest the giant planets in the solar system accreted slow and cold (20º K) from snowflakes and dust at their current orbits, forming frozen, highly deuterated Methane Gas Hydrate bodies (MGH), together comprising > 300 earth masses of water. Jupiter incorporates the heavy elements as dust grains, which are uniformly distributed throughout the solid planet resulting in Jupiter's high density, 1.33, compared with pure MGH, 0.9 g/cm³. A recent (6,000 years BP) high energy impact on Jupiter triggered a massive nuclear fusion explosion of the local deuterium, which ejected proto-Venus plus the Galilean moons. The impact also expanded the incandescent atmosphere of Jupiter tenfold, initiating a continuous fusion reaction in the impact crater. A hot plasma plume from this reaction, named Juno in Roman myth, originally extended 2 x 10⁶ km from the impact site at 22 ºS Latitude, beyond Callisto, rotating rapidly with Jupiter. It slowly diminished over ~ 5000 years, sweeping over the Galilean moons every eight or nine hours, resulting in the higher densities and temperatures of the inner Galilean moons. The longevity of the plume confirms the high deuterium content of our giant planets, a feature observed in a small number of Large Dark Nebula such as 1689N (Roueff).

While it doesn't happen every day, we are occasionally treated to a funky sky phenomenon of a halo around the sun or moon.
This ring is caused by cirrostratus clouds, which are made of ice crystals. They are found above 20,000 feet. They can get quite thick, but sun or moon light can be seen through them.

This light is refracted through the ice crystals, and this causes the halo. At times, the clouds can be very thin and hardly visible until the halo is shown.

We often see cirrostratus clouds increasing ahead of a front or storm system. Thursday afternoon's halo was caused by moisture being thrown into our area by the remnants of Tropical Depression Cindy.