#Light phenomena examples manual#
#Light phenomena examples full#

Called a ‘lunar halo’, they’re mostly caused by ice crystals in cold wintry air at northern latitudes of the northern hemisphere.

#Light phenomena examples full#

Photo by Luis Vilanova Author tip: The exact same thing can happen to a full Moon. Wide angle lenses are needed for sun halos (also called parhelion, icebow and ‘false Sun’) to get them in your frame - but remember to never look at the Sun directly through the camera viewfinder.

#Light phenomena examples manual#

However, be safe: use ‘live view’ on your LCD and never look at the Sun through your camera’s optical viewfinder! If your image is too bright or too dark, switch to manual and retain all your settings save for exposure times, which you should experiment with – but keep them short. Wide-angle lenses will also cope well with focusing on the Sun, which in aperture priority mode is a good way to get the correct exposure. Sun halos occur on a 22° circle because those ice crystals refract the Sun’s rays by exactly that angle, so you’ll need a wide-angle lens to capture them in a composition. The latter can happen at any time and be seen from anywhere on the planet. That can happen close to the ground in winter on cold days or high up in the Earth’s atmosphere as sunlight travels through cirrostratus cloud formations. Also called parhelion, icebow and ‘false Sun’, a wide circle of light around our star is a natural atmospheric phenomenon caused by sunlight refracting off hexagonal ice crystals in the atmosphere. For those who love photography and travel, here’s a bucket list of rare atmospheric phenomena to check-off… ‍ 1 Sun halosĪt some point you've probably seen a strange halo around the Sun during a clear day. Usually caused by how sunlight interacts with particles in Earth’s atmosphere, solar and lunar halos, alpenglow and zodiacal light may appear to be randomly occurring, but they’re sometimes tied to seasons and weather conditions that can be predicted.

'The sky so often constitutes the backdrop to landscape photos, but sometimes it can become the main subject.'įrom rainbows to light pillars, there are a host of atmospheric phenomena that occur seemingly at random that can make for incredible one-off photographs. The sky so often constitutes the backdrop to landscape photos, but sometimes it can become the main subject.