Spaceweather posted an amazing image today. Looking at the sun can be a wincing, painful experience. Yesterday in Finland it was a rare delight. "On June 24th, multiple arcs and rings of light appeared around the sun," reports Ville Miettinen of Kuopio. "What a spectacular view!" He dashed inside and grabbed his camera to record the amazing vista. "They lingered in the sky for three whole hours, only disappearing when thick clouds intervened. These were very, very impressive halos - some of them quite rare," he said.
The variety of halos they witnessed was caused by a corresponding variety of ice crystals with rare gem-like perfection and unusually precise crystal-to-crystal alignment. What are the odds? No one knows but, apparently, they're higher in Finland. Another place to look for rare halos is in the realtime gallery: These luminous forms are called ice halos, because they caused by sunlight shining through icy crystals in cirrus clouds. Usually their forms are rather simple, like a solitary pillar or an uncomplicated ring. In this case, however, a complex assortment of halos criss-crossed the sky. In Miettinen's photo, we see a complete parhelic circle, a circumscribed halo, a supralateral arc, a 22-degree halo, and a pair of sundogs.
