Iridescent Clouds

Yesterday I saw some really colorful Iridescent clouds, one of my favorite cloud phenomena. These clouds are visible when parts of clouds are thin and have similar size droplets, diffraction can make them shine with colours like a corona. I like how the Sun was covered enough to be visible through and not totally overexposed.

Nikon D850 with Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8E
Exposure: 1/8000 sec. ISO 64 @ 112mm f/8

Rare colorful clouds

Yesterday, one hour before sunset, I did see some colorful clouds in the opposite direction of the Sun (At the Anti solar point). I never seen colored clouds there before so I had a hard time figuring out if they were polar stratospheric clouds or iridescent clouds. The colored clouds slowly faded away as the sun set so I thought it might be iridescent clouds, but I never seen them opposite of the Sun before.

When I returned home I contacted Les Cowley at OPOD (http://www.atoptics.co.uk) to get his opinion of these clouds and he guessed that it's tropospheric iridescent clouds. He's never seen them opposite the sun before so this is probably very rare.

Always exciting to see a new phenomena, perfect ending for 2017.

Happy new year everyone!

Iridescent Clouds

Yesterday I saw some really colorful Iridescent Clouds. It is a fairly uncommon phenomenon. The colors are produced due to small water droplets or small ice crystals in the clouds that scatters the light. Larger ice crystals produce halos.

I've seen this phenomena a couple of times before but not this vivid. I hurried back home to grab a lens with a longer focal length to really get up close. In this photo I enhanced contrast and saturation a bit to bring to colors and structures out.