Rainbow Clouds

A few weeks ago when my sister was up visiting from Utah, we were going through the pictures on her camera when she showed me these cloud pictures that she took.  Awesome!  I’ve never seen anything like these clouds before.  I looked it up on the internet to see just why they had the colors in them and this is what it had:  What causes this effect?  It’s pretty simple, actually.  Ice crystals in the clouds act as little prisms, breaking up the sunlight into its component colors and spreading them out.  It’s essentially the same thing that causes “real” rainbows, except with ice and not water droplets.  The angle between the sun, the cloud, and you is important as well, but the essential ingredients needed for this effect are icy clouds and sunlight.  That’s it.

I also found the following:   These colorful clouds are called iridescent clouds, and the phenomenon is called cloud iridescence or irisation. The term comes from Iris, the Greek personification of the rainbow. It’s similar to the colors you might see when oil lies on the surface of a puddle of water. When you see a cloud like this, you know there are especially tiny ice crystals or water droplets in the air. Larger ice crystals produce solar or lunar halos, but tiny ice crystals or water droplets cause light to be diffracted – spread out – creating this rainbow-like effect in the clouds.

I at least know the reason behind her cloud pictures and hopefully someday I will get the opportunity to take such beautiful cloud pictures of my own.