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25/12/2004 9:16 pm
My wife Ellen and I are watching something that we have never seen before, we are sitting on on our front deck in the Northern Sierras (I rushed into my office to write this) and the sky show is unbelieveable. The moon is centered around a large circle that I have never seen before. This is not just a ring around the moon, this is a large circle that separates the moon and inner circle from the rest of the sky like a giant eye. The inner circle was pitch black and clowd surrounding the perfect circle with lite up in a bright light grey.
The outer circle is changing from a distinct ring to a halo and then back again. The ring is perfect in shape and seems about hundreds of miles from the center of the moon (from the human eye). This scene almost takes up the whole sky. We have never seen anything like this .....it is incredible. I am going back outside....I had to write this down. It is 11:05 at night, Saturday, December 25th. We can hear the animals yelling from miles around,
26/12/2004 3:13 pm
Isn't that an upper atmosphere phenomena? Something about ice crystals in the stratosphere? I recall something similiar one Easter Sunday in my youth. There was a distinctive halo around the noon day sun, but it was a clear, cloudless day. I thought it was something miraculous but later my science teacher explained it away as upper atmosphere ice crystals and the effect of the light rays of the sun. I liked my explanation better.:)
26/12/2004 6:37 pm
Fairly common...
I've seen it before several times but sought it out on the internet and here is the most simple of answers...
"This fairly common sight occurs when high thin clouds containing millions of tiny ice crystals cover much of the sky. Each ice crystal acts like a miniature lens. Because most of the crystals have a similar elongated hexagonal shape, light entering one crystal face and exiting through the opposing face refracts 22 degrees, which corresponds to the radius of the Moon Halo. A similar Sun Halo may be visible during the day. The town in the foreground of the above picture is San Sebastian, Spain. The distant planet Jupiter appears by chance on the halo's upper right. Exactly how ice-crystals form in clouds remains under investigation."
27/12/2004 7:42 am
Both of your explanations are obviously correct, and true this is quite common ; however, what we saw was different. There was no halo or ring around the moon (as a back light), the moon was like a perfect round circle placed on a jet black back-ground. The brightness was so intense it lit up all of the landscape as far as the eye can see (if we have our lights turned off there are no other lights for miles around, or at least as far as the eye can see) and distance from the moon to the 'perfect outer' ring was......hmmmm this is hard to explain....if you held up your forearm straight in front of you and put your index finger on the edge of the moon, it would take about one hundred forearm lengths to reach the outer circle. The outer circle would be like if you were ice fishing and you cut a perfect round hole in the ice....what surrounded the cut circle is the snow.......that is what the rest of the sky looked like.
I have worked in the 'robotic space industry' for many years and my wife spent many years sailing her sail boats (from San Francisco to the Big Island) and many times depended on the sky for her navigation. We both spend a lot of time checking out the stars, we had just never seen anything like this before. Thanks for your acurate responses.
27/12/2004 7:45 pm
Although the size of it was not the same...
I saw the same that you saw. My house is more in the country that in the Burbs...2.5 acres 1/2 way to baltimore from Washington DC where there are no street lights. In the wide open field on that same night, the moon was so full and bright it lit up the eyes of a herd of deer in the field in front of my house like tiny lasers pinpointing their faces.
I looked up at the moon and saw the perfect ring on an otherwise large moon. The distance of the ring from the moon was easier 4 times the diameter of the moon itself.
It looked very much like the picture I posted on the same night, 3,000 miles from your loacation.
27/12/2004 9:34 pm
You can tell that we are both NASA expatriots. We still search the skies and enjoy it's mysteries.