Just resently, January 1, 2010, there was a corona. What’s a corona you ask? Well when I first saw it, I didn’t know what it was either. I’ll start with a couple of hint’s. I was late at night & I was feeding my dog outside. I decided to look up & to my surpries, I saw a moon I hadn’t seen before. I told my family what I had see & they didn’t believe me until I got them to go see it for themselves. Now, I tell you what I saw for even a classmate of mine got to see such a rare occasion. The moon had a rainbow around it. It was a full moon & the rainbow made a perfect circle surrounding it. If you saw it for yourself, the first thing you’d do is tell someone else to make sure it was your imagination.
I didn’t know what it was called at first, so I tried to look it up. I started with “moonlight rainbow”, which then translated to “moonbow”, but the images I found weren’t what I saw. Finally, I started to read from the sites I was given & it said that what I had saw wasn’t a moonbow. Moonbows are always in the opposite part of the sky from the moon, less than 45 degrees above the horizon, and the sky must be dark for them to be seen. Also, there must be rain falling opposite the moon. This combination of requirements makes moonbows much more rare than rainbows produced by the sun.
A colored ring close to the moon is a corona, a diffraction phenomenon produced by very small water droplets or ice crystals in clouds. The moon was close to 90 degrees above the horizon when I saw it & it was dark of course. Another definition I found was: a faintly colored luminous ring appearing to surround a celestial body visible through a haze or thin cloud, especially such a ring around the moon or sun, caused by diffraction of light from suspended matter in the intervening medium. Sadly, when my mom tried to take a picture, the camera couldn’t take it. I tried looking it up online to but it would seem moonbows are easier to see than coronas, but that doesn’t mean they’re anymore rare. Now if only they could be predicted like other astronomical phenomenas.
http://www.answers.com/topic/moonbow
http://www.answers.com/topic/corona
Below is the best picture I could get, but what I saw was that the corona was a bit further away….as if separated by space: (( O ))
http://www.cloudappreciationsociety.org/gallery/index.php?rating=1&showimage=2947