On Saturday, we have full moon. It’s called The full Cold Moon or the full Long Nights Moon.
It is thus time to look if the moon is explosing into lunar dogs!
Indeed, bright moonlight shining through ice crystals in the air can create a luminous network of arcs, pillars and ‘dogs around the lunar disk.
This mind-blowing picture showing the moon exploding into errie halos was photographed by James Helmericks in northern Alaska:
As shown in the amazing and complex photo, the clouds and mist present must have contained a variety of ice crystals, with many shapes and orientations. Look again how bright the halos are!
In this picture, you can observe different space phenomena:
- A brilliant and bright parselenic circle crossing through the Moon
- Intense moondogs to the left and right of the Moon.
- An upper tangent arc atop the familiar 22 degree halo.
- An outer rare 46 degree halo
- And many other halos that often go unnoticced.
Look at the Full Moon Almanach to get an idea about the different full moon names and their origins.
[…] halos around the moon are eerie but rather common space phenomena. Nonetheless, in rare mysterious cases, they have an elliptic form and look like a giant alien […]