On my way out of the house last night I happened to look up at the sky. Expecting to see a clear night sky, I saw something I’ve never witnessed. A weird “moon halo”. I was mystified by it and couldnt turn away, it was so cool and eerie. I qiuckly took my iPhone out to take a snapshot but, alas no luck since it was almost pitch black and the only light source was the moon. A small bright dot in the middle of the picture was all I saw. I tweeted about it & ran back in the house to grab my DSLR camera.

Back outside and holding the camera as still as I could I took some shots of the moon and its halo. At first I couldnt get the right exposure but after importing it into Photoshop I was able to adjust the levels a bit to get the halo more apparent.

I added some more images to my Flickr page if your interested.

Acoording to Wikipedia the scientific explaination is as follows:
Moon halos are mostly caused by ice crystals in cold cirrus clouds located high (5–10 km, or 3–6 miles) in the upper troposphere. Sometimes in very cold weather optical halos are formed by crystals close to ground level, called diamond dust. The crystals behave like jewels, refracting and reflecting sunlight between their faces, sending shafts of light in particular directions.

In another more indepth Wikipedia article explaining 22 degree halos it states:
22° halos form when the sky contains millions of poorly oriented ice crystals. Some of these happen to be aligned perpendicular to the sun light as viewed by one observer which produces the illuminated 22° circle, while other crystals produces the same phenomenon for other observers. An Alexander’s band can be seen inside the halo.

It was quite a remarkable sight and the image is still seered into my brain. I can’t wait to see my next one, and I hope you get to see one too!

PS: See Guso, you didnt really think I wouldn’t take pictures of something so cool did you? ^.~