Halo around the moon

Beautiful Halo around the moon tonight.


"Sometimes you look up on a clear night and see a huge circle, or ring, of light around the moon. This circle is called a lunar halo. They’re pretty common, but they’re so mysterious looking that people often express amazement upon seeing them.
The sky looks fairly clear. After all, you can see the moon. And yet halos are a sign of high thin cirrus clouds drifting 20,000 feet or more above our heads. These clouds contain millions of tiny ice crystals. The halos you see are glints of light from these ice crystals, which have to be oriented and positioned just so with respect to your eye, in order for the halo to appear.
That’s why, like rainbows, halos around the moon – or sun – are personal. Everyone sees their own particular halo, made by their own particular ice crystals, which are different from the ice crystals making the halo of the person standing next to you."


What is that to do with Square Foot Gardening? Well, a chance of frost is forecast for tonight and I was out covering up one bed with a sheet so as to, hopefully, save some lettuce that I have growing. It is getting cold right now, and I would hate to lose the lettuce just for one night of frost when there may be a weeks left before the really hard frosts set in.
I have also planted shallots and leeks a couple of weeks ago so that they can put down good root systems for a flying start in the spring. I have never tried this before.
Everything is pretty well over now, after a very satisfying harvest this year. The stars were Scarlet Runner, beans, kale and chard which kept producing for months until I am almost sick of them. Managed also to preserve some of each in the freezer for later use when I will appreciate eating my own veggies during the winter.
The leaves are falling thick and fast now, so two of my three beds will be covered with them over the winter while the third one (with the lettuce) will have a plastic hoop house over it, provided I get it made in time as the sheet I have over it tonight is OK for a light frost but not deep cold.
I fully expect tomorrow that I will be clearing up the mass of foliage from the runner beans and putting them on the compost heap. Then it will be shutdown until spring and perhaps an early start under the hoop house.

I took notice.....with my camera. It also means rain/weather is coming in the next day or two most of the time. The closer the halo, the closer the weather. Also, if you see stars inside the ring, I have heard them called "moon dogs," but that is a misnomer. Moon dogs are associated with halos, but you'll have to search them because they are hard to describe without pictures. However, another tale is that the number of stars inside a halo predicts the number of days before you will receive inclement weather.

FYI, these pics were taken on Tuesday...it rained on Wednesday. (And, my son Matthew predicted the rain on Monday...seems he can even beat the moon...lol.)

Enjoy..



Allowing a bit more light in to show how big our halo was..

The halo I saw was actualy a large ring around the moon. Inside that ring was also the planet Mars. It was beautiful.

Kelejan, thanks for identifying Mars for me. I was up and watching the moon and that incredibly bright body next to it the last couple of very early mornings, and was really wanting to know what it was.
I think that what you saw was a moondog. BBG, do you agree?
Sundogs are similar. An elderly man who walks by my house on Sundays stopped this week to tell me that he'd seen more sundogs this year than in any previously. He said that they're caused by high thin cirrus clouds, the temperature of which is -67*F. I saw a few, too.
I've only ever seen 2-3 moondogs myself. Lucky you!
Keep looking up. It's good to see sky there.

Kelejan wrote:Beautiful Halo around the moon tonight.
"Sometimes you look up on a clear night and see a huge circle, or ring, of light around the moon. This circle is called a lunar halo. They’re pretty common, but they’re so mysterious looking that people often express amazement upon seeing them.
The sky looks fairly clear. After all, you can see the moon. And yet halos are a sign of high thin cirrus clouds drifting 20,000 feet or more above our heads. These clouds contain millions of tiny ice crystals. The halos you see are glints of light from these ice crystals, which have to be oriented and positioned just so with respect to your eye, in order for the halo to appear.
That’s why, like rainbows, halos around the moon – or sun – are personal. Everyone sees their own particular halo, made by their own particular ice crystals, which are different from the ice crystals making the halo of the person standing next to you."

janezee, when I googled "Halo around the moon, what came up was the above paragraph. It said nothing about moondogs. It did mention that the halo/ring was because of the high (22,000ft) cirrus clouds that were there even though the sky looked clear. Halo or moondog, it was awesome.

hehehe When I looked up moon dog, I got "A paraselene."
Of course, that's as clear as mud to me.
So here's the def of 'paraselene'
"a moonlike optical illusion caused by moonlight passing through ice crystals in the upper atmosphere"
"a bright spot in the sky similar to a parhelion but formed by moonlight. "
Which of course led me to
parhelion
a bright spot in the sky appearing on either side of the sun, formed by refraction of sunlight through ice crystals high in the earth’s atmosphere. Also called sun dog

Origin:
mid 17th century: from Latin parelion, from Greek para- 'beside' + hēlios 'sun'

Isn't it funny when one person brings something into your notice, someone else brings it up again so soon after? Thanks for the info on Mars, and the prod I needed to find this out.

Googling further, what I found below gives a better written desription of what I saw: it also showed picture, exactly what I saw.



"A moon ring, also known as a winter halo, is a phenomenon that usually appears in conjunction with a full moon. There appears to be a whitish ring, approximately 10 to 20 times the size of the moon, surrounding the moon and centered on it. It is caused by refraction of the light from the full moon in the ice particles floating in the clouds, as opposed to a rainbow, where light refracts in the water vapor that makes up the clouds. Since this happens most effectively at a certain angle, this ring appears at the bottom of the clouds, and since similar triangles must form between the moon, the refracting surface, and the observation point, the "highlighted" clouds are at approximately the same distance from the moon, creating the image of a ring."

Awesome!