Questions tagged [atmospheric-optics]
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Why does Earth's atmosphere have a whiter color near the horizon?
Why does Earth's atmosphere have a whiter color (paler) near the horizon? (on a clear, cloudless day when the sun is highest in the sky)?
The amount of air being greater in this direction, why is the ...
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Which chemicals are most responsible for the blue sky?
Earth's atmosphere is especially good at refracting blue light, which makes the sky blue.
Which gas or gasses is/are responsible for this?
If some gasses in the atmosphere do not refract blue light, ...
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Explanation for contrail with a dark line
I have recently taken a picture while on a walk, which is showing a phenomenon I cannot really find an explanation of.
A contrail was visible in the air, backed with a dark line that went all the way ...
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What is an "exquisitely rare pollen corona"? How can pollen produce several tight rainbow circles around the Sun, and why pollen specifically?
The Forrest Mims YouTube video An Exquisitely Rare Pollen Corona shows a pair of rings closely circled around the Sun with rainbow colors; blue on the inside.
The first annulus is easy to see, the ...
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Unusual small bright ring in storm cloud
I was taking photos of a storm moving through the area, Southwest of Fort Worth, Texas and caught this image in one of the series. The photography is a hobby. I was using my IPhone 6. I researched ...
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What causes this arc in the night sky where the background is brighter on one side than the other?
This comment to Did nobody in the Astronomy community think 12,000 new satellites in LEO might be a problem? links to Phys.org's New ESO study evaluates impact of satellite constellations on ...
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Help understanding this image of an unusual double reflected rainbow
The BBC News item Double reflected rainbow photographed in Orkney shows an unusual kind of double rainbow.
According to the article:
The image was captured by Martin Gray at Gyran on Tuesday morning, ...
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What might be causing this rainbow-like effect on the ground?
The BBC News article Iceland's Okjokull glacier commemorated with plaque about a dead glacier speaks for itself.
However there is a photo in the article that caught my eye.
It shows mountains in ...
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Is this particular multiple rainbow unexplained by science?
The gist of the BBC News article 'Incredibly rare rainbow' photographed in Highlands is that while it has several familiar features, there are aspects that are still unexplained.
Question: Are there ...
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Where does the sky's blueness come from; at what altitudes is it being produced?
Rayleigh scattering (mostly) results in a blue sky (Diffuse_sky_radiation) as seen from Earth's surface. Go up in a plane to cruise altitude and the sky gets noticeably blue-er, and then darker.
The ...
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How to predict when contrails are likely to form over a specific location using public data?
I saw the image below used as a click-attractor to an unrelated story about tourism, but found a larger version here.
Contrails, or water condensation trails happen when planes pass through the ...
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Why are these patterns of scattered sunlight aligned to the local horizontal and vertical directions?
The information discussed in the CleanTechnica article Full Fledged 5 Alarm Climate Emergency In Antarctica is certainly disconcerting, but the stock photo of the sky and various atmospheric phenomena ...
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On the light difference between morning and afternoon
It is long time that I am looking for what physical reason(s) explains this observation:
the sun ambient light between sunrise and midday is crispy, somehow whiter than that of the afternoon hours. ...
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Are there measurements or calculations that suggest atmospheric ice plates would be horizontal to within 0.1 degrees?
This question describes a recently released explanation for flashes of light seen at the sub-solar point above Earth from the DSCOVR satellite, which is located in a special orbit between the Earth ...
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What mechanism leads to these spectacular iridescent patterns in clouds labeled as a "Fire Rainbow"?
The 21-Feb-2016 BBC new article Singapore 'fire rainbow' cloud phenomenon lights up sky shows several photos of a rainbow-like iridescence in clouds on a sunny day in Singapore (about 1.3 degrees ...
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What actually happens to reduce the perceived color in a 'white rainbow" or "fog-bow"?
The image below is included in the BBC article Amazing white rainbow snapped over Scottish moor. Apparently this phenomenon is sometimes called a "fog-bow" and is characterized by the washing out of ...
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Explanation for single rainbow that contained colors several times
I saw a rainbow outside Silverton, CO last week that for a few minutes seemed to show part of the color cycle (red to purple) several times within the same band. This picture is how it looked to my ...
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Why does the road appear wet on a sunny day?
Whenever I'm travelling by road on a hot sunny day and I look towards the horizon, it appears as though there is puddle ahead but as I approach it, it disappears. Why does this happen?
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Why do clouds sometimes form a ring around the Sun?
Someone shared a video with me in which clouds were forming a ring around the Sun. I took this screen shot of that video:
What is the reason behind this?
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