Round Rainbow!

I just had a phone call from a friend who teaches at one of the Private Schools here in Gaborone and a text message come in on my phone as well from another friend saying "Quick, go look at the sun!"  My teacher friend said everyone is outside at the school, taking a look.

Well without commenting on the danger of standing looking into the sun for too long, after putting on my sunglasses and taking a quick look up - what an amazing unexpected sight greeted me!

It was 11am, a low 10% humidity, already 33 degrees Celcius, and the sky was covered with a continuous layer of very very thin wispy clouds like a fine netting across what is normally blue, turning it a strange eerie whitish light grey.

And I look up and see an amazing sight!

This is no small ring around the sun - this is HUGE....so huge that I'm struggling to get the whole circle in with my camera on the widest angle lens setting I have.  As I hold up a ruler about 40 centimetres from my face, the ring measures approximately 30cm across!

It's like a type of round rainbow as the sunlight passes through the moisture (ice crystals apparently) of those thin wispy clouds.

In actual fact its called a  22^° Sun Halo

I took this second photo below a few minutes later of the full circle through the wire we have strung above our porch area in the hope our bougainvillea (which you can see just in the corner of the photograph), will grow across it.  The wires are about 2.5 metres above the ground and about 20cm apart

To give you another idea of how big this halo was - if I stretched out my arm and did a hand-span, from one horizon to the other is about 9 of my hand-spans and this halos was two hand-spans across (diameter) - right above my head.

....it felt like a giant 'flying saucer' hovering above, since the colour inside the halo was a great deal darker than the surrounding sky.

- about an hour later - the whole sky is now mostly blue with a few patchy wisps of clouds and the dark 'centre' of the halo ring is gone and the outside 'ring' itself is also almost faded completely.

Thank you Lord for the opportunity to experience such an awesome and not so usual sight!

Apart from the fun and interest of seeing such a thing, it is said because of the type of cloud (cirrus) it happens with, it often precedes some storms a few days later!  

Well we do need the rain that's for sure.