Ring Around The Moon


Photo: brian s huff [Flickr]

Did you see the ring around the moon last night? If you did and wondered what caused it, Yahoo! Buzz Log has the answer:

Though it looked ominous, the shiny ring around the moon last night was actually a rather common weather phenomenon. According to various weather-related blogs across the Buzz, this ring around the moon occurs when thin cirrus clouds, which contain ice crystals, refract the moonlight. A blog from the Goddard Space Flight Center explains that "the shape of the ice crystals results in a focusing of the light into a ring. Since the ice crystals typically have the same shape, namely a hexagonal shape, the Moon ring is always the same size."

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Weather is local. Therefore, so is this effect. Not everyone in the whole world could have seen the same thing. C'mon Alex, I thought you were a scientist.
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The ring around the moon is an old sailor's foreacsting supersition. I forget excatly how it goes, but the idea is if the ring is small, a large storm is coming, but if the ring is large, the storm will be small. No clue if it has any scientific accuracy or not. :)
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Didn't see it in my neck of the woods last night, but there was one here last month. Have you ever seen one around the sun? I have, but I don't know if it's the same phenomenon.
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We get these every two months or so in the Northeast. I never thought they were that big a deal until the internet decided to tell me so.

The one in that picture is pretty tame- sometimes they get twice that size and the edge goes a sort of whitish purple.
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Moondog.

It's also an Indian legend that this phenomenon is a predictor of imminent moisture falling from the sky.

Our local weatherman has kept statistics for a few years and it turns out to be true a majority of the time. He brings it up anytime there is a good sundog or moondog.
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A woman down the street where I live swears it has to do something with Chemtrails and the coming Doom of 2012- She knows for sure that this didn't happen -as much- in her youth.

I just think it is a beautiful phenomenon and I love to see them.
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Yup, a moon dog. We had once a while back here in western SD. It means change in weather around here. Sun dogs in the winter predict colder weather. When there are two, watch out!

Love this blog, by the way!
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