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The Rainbow Thread

I'm fed up of seeing rainbows at the moment (much as I love them) because they're always precisely over the route that I'm cycling to and from work!
 
I'm fed up of seeing rainbows at the moment (much as I love them) because they're always precisely over the route that I'm cycling to and from work!
Look for a pot of gold...
 
There was a short vertical rainbow visible about 8:30 GMT from Loughborough, UK. It was due south and was coincident with what I thought at the time was the sun, but that has since appeared to the left. I checked a website that said the moon is below the horizon so I'm assuming it was a highly reflective cloud.
 
East Fortune Race circuit - weekend just gone. Can't remember the last time both ends were visible. Unfortunately Mr Frideswide was marshalling so he couldn't peg it over the fields to investigate. :(

1689695708032.png
 
There was a short vertical rainbow visible about 8:30 GMT from Loughborough, UK. It was due south and was coincident with what I thought at the time was the sun, but that has since appeared to the left. I checked a website that said the moon is below the horizon so I'm assuming it was a highly reflective cloud.
This post was a few years ago, but it wasn't a rainbow - rainbows are always opposite the sun. This sounds more like a parhelion of some sort - probably a sundog. They sometimes look like vertical rainbows, as here.
sundog.png


Parhelia of this kind are often accompanied by a kind of 'tail', pointing away from the sun - but not always, and I can't clearly see one in this picture (from Les Crowley's Atoptics site https://atoptics.co.uk/halo/dogim10.htm)

The fact that this was observed in Dec 2021 makes it more likely to be a sundog - they are ice crystal phenomena.
 
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