A satellite photo captured an unusual 'double rainbow' glory appearing next to an unconnected chain of rare vortices in the clouds above Mexico's Guadalupe Island.
This 2012 satellite photo shows a unique perspective of a rare, rainbow-like phenomenon, known as a glory, that appeared next to a Mexican island just as the landmass spawned a separate series of equally uncommon cloud vortices.
Glories are multicolour light shows similar to rainbows, with one key difference: While rainbows form via a combination of reflection and refraction when sunlight bounces off falling rain droplets and splits into different wavelengths, glories are created by backward diffraction - when light bounces directly off even smaller water droplets in clouds or mist, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. Because of this, glories only appear exactly opposite the sun, known as the anti-solar point.
This glory appeared adjacent to Guadalupe Island in the Pacific Ocean, around 150 miles off the western coast of Mexico, and seemed to stretch for more than 300 miles. Although there appear to be two distinct glories running parallel to one another, it is actually a single entity.
The 'rainbow' streaks run parallel on either side of the satellite's trajectory above our planet. The colours in each streak are perfectly inverted compared to the other: From left to right, the rainbow on the left of the image runs from red to blue and the rainbow on the right runs from blue to red.
While the glory and vortices are both only visible because of the thick stratocumulus clouds covering this part of the Pacific, their appearances are not connected to one another.
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