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"Fire Rainbow"
The image above was captured on camera as it hung for about an hour across a several-hundred
square mile area of sky above northern Idaho (near the Washington border) on 3 June 2006.
This is an atmostpheric phenomena, a “fire rainbow.” This one is not a hoax.
Clouds have to be cirrus, at least 20k feet in the air,
with just the right amount of ice crystals and the sun has to hit the clouds at precisely 50 degrees.
Sunlight entering the crystals’ vertical side faces and leaving through their bottom faces
is refracted (as through a prism) and separated into an array of visible colors.
When the plate crystals in cirrus clouds are aligned
optimally (i.e., with their faces parallel to the ground),
the resulting display is a brilliant spectrum of colors reminiscent of a rainbow.
