By Aaryan Mehta
We are so engrossed in our lives with school and office work that we often forget the big, beautiful world around us. Stunning, natural phenomena are happening out there, every single day! One of them is halos.
Halos may look like circular rainbows, but they are starkly different. Halos are colourful circles around the moon or the sun. Moon halos are usually white, while sun halos are rainbow-coloured.
The formation of these beautiful rings needs ice crystals to become visible, so they usually form when there are cirrostratus clouds in the sky. Cirrostratus clouds are thin, high altitude clouds made out of ice crystals. Not all ice crystals will, however, produce halos. Only the tiniest and most poorly aligned ones form halos. Light gets refracted inside these hexagonal crystals.
Most rays deflect at an angle near 22 degrees, forming the most common type of halo: the 22-degree halo (the circular halo). The inside of these halos looks darker than the rest of the sky, which gives an impression of a “hole in the sky”.
They form more often than you might expect. So, the next time you’re trekking or in the lap of mother nature, be on the lookout!
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