VivaSync

You’re flying coach across the country. You just got your teeny-tiny pretzel bag, six ounces of ice cubes and a splash of ginger ale when you mash on the recline button and decide to enjoy the flight as much as humanly possible.

It’s kind of cloudy, but you glance out the window to see whether there’s anything interesting on the ground. Instead, you see this — three rainbow rings hugging your plane’s shadow. What is going on?

It’s not aliens beaming you into the mothership. Really.

We received this exact question yesterday from Alicia Buchanan, a CWG reader in Herndon, Va.:

A friend of mine was on a recent flight. She was sitting over the wing, with the sun behind them, and they were flying over moderate cloud cover. She looked down and could see the shadow of the plane on the clouds, completely encircled by a rainbow. We debated on what could have caused such an unusual phenomenon, when it occurred to me that I had the most crack team of meteorologists in my own back yard!

Aw, thanks Alicia. We love being your crack team of meteorologists! :D

The full photo Alicia’s friend sent is below. Melissa Bellante lives in Bristol, Conn., and she was on a flight from Denver to Hartford when she spotted the curious rainbow from her window seat. She didn’t mention whether her ginger ale was watered down.

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Yes, it’s glorious, but what is it?

It’s a glory!

Glories are most commonly seen from planes and on mountain tops on misty days. The glory is always seen around the observer’s shadow. The sun is always behind the observer, and the glory is always below the observer’s horizon.

We’ve seen a lot of these photos from hikers who climb above the cloud line. If the conditions are right, when they look down with the sun behind them, they will see a halo-like rainbow around the head of their shadow, hence the name “glory.”

Here’s an example of that from summitpost.org:

To boil it down to its simplest form, a glory is created in the same way a rainbow is — water droplets bend the light into its colorful spectra. But exactly how the glory is formed is not understood.

Because the glory is fairly large, and has at least three visible “rainbows,” we know that the cloud droplets in Bellante’s photo were somewhat uniform in size (around a difference of 10 percent) and the drop size was probably fairly small, probably one-fifth the diameter of a human hair.

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I can also tell that Bellante was sitting just behind the wing, even if the wing wasn’t visible in the photo, because the photographer’s “shadow” will always be at the center of the glory. If she were seated at the front of the plane, then that section would be in the middle of the glory, and the tail would extend into the rainbow.

Glories are not something you see every day, so if you’re lucky enough to spot one, definitely take a photo.

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