Moon Rings
Monday, February 22 • 08:21 AM
Last night Rosie asked me to look up at the moon. She
said there was a big ring around it. I looked up and
saw no ring. Instead it looked pretty fuzzy, and I
told her the moon was just infested with fungus. She
said over and over to look so I looked again. And way
our, further out than I had ever seen was a huge moon
ring! I had never seen one so big. The moon was
directly overhead so it was difficult to stand and
look straight up at it. But that ring… beautiful!
Moon rings form from ice crystals that have frozen in the upper atmosphere. The ice refracts the moonlight, which is reflected sunlight and sometimes rainbow colors can be seen in the ring. The ice typically freeze into a hexagonal shape which determines the size of the ring. Rosie said the number of stars inside the ring determines how many days of bad weather we’ll have. We didn’t see any stars inside, which surprised me considering the size of the ring. But, it did rain pretty good last night and I hope that’s all it will do (I was planning on washing my car). Of course, the idea of mixing weather with the moon ring has some merit. The ice crystals form in the high atmosphere, are associated with cirrus clouds, mix that with a warm front in a low pressure system and you have a storm.
On a similar topic, ice crystals form those similar rings during the day and are known as sun dogs. Here is an awesome video on you tube of a NASA rocket plowing its way through the sun dog and I’m told the resulting waves you see is from the rocket blasting through the sound barrier and it is the sonic boom that creates the waves. Really cool! Here’s a NASA video of the event.
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