Yesterday, you may have spotted stripes of color in the sky. Many Lincoln residents, as well as myself, saw fragments of a rainbow on the way about our morning commute. As I arrived at Lincoln High School, I noticed a second stripe of color. I had never seen anything like it before and I began to question how it works.
To my disappointment, what I saw was not technically a double rainbow. Though there were two beams, those beams were only part of what is known as a “sun halo”. A sun halo is a circular ring of light that forms around the sun due to light refraction caused by tiny ice crystals in the air. A “sundog”, what others may have seen yesterday, is part of this sun halo that appears as a singular stripe in the sky. The colors usually go from red closest to the sun, out to blue on the outside of the sundog.
After the annoyance of bad roads and an icy windshield, some can agree a rain circle was just what people needed to brighten their morning.
