Iridescent clouds make for dreamlike sky, see it here
Meteorologist
Monday, January 22, 2018, 5:47 PM - The sky over central Peru took on an otherworldly appearance late last week as pink, purple, blue, and green clouds lit up the horizon.
Caught on camera, iridescent clouds looked like nebulae floating over the town of Lamas, in the San Martin region of the South American country.
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While they look like visitors from another world, iridescent clouds like these are fairly common right here on Earth, and are caused when small water droplets or ice crystals scatter sunlight. When the droplets or crystals are all similar in size, they split the incoming sunlight as a prism would, leading to the rainbow effect.
The principle is similar to halos we sometimes see around the sun and moon; the main difference is that, to get the rainbow effect, most of the rays of sunlight must only diffract through a single droplet. Halos also tend to form through relatively thicker clouds with larger droplets.
Check out some other images of this beautiful phenomenon and other 'rainbow clouds' submitted by our viewers, below.
High definition video shows the rare natural phenomenon known as iridescent clouds. Taken near Mt. Popa in Myanmar during the summer of 2013. Getty Images.
Joel Hall, Whitehouse, TX.
Rebecca Martyn, Windsor, ON.
Cleide Amorim, Wawa, ON.
Denise Chambers, Hinton, AB.
Karen Butler, Nanaimo, BC.
Thumbnail: Cleide Amorim
