A Colorful Lunar Corona
What are those colorful rings around the Moon?
A corona.
Rings like this will sometimes appear when the Moon is seen through thin clouds.
The effect is created by the quantum mechanical
diffraction of light around individual, similarly-sized water droplets in an
intervening
but mostly-transparent cloud.
Since light of different colors has
different wavelengths,
each color diffracts differently.
Lunar Coronae are one of the few
quantum mechanical color effects that can be
easily seen with the unaided eye.
The
featured lunar corona was captured around a
Strawberry Moon on June 2 from
La Plata,
Argentina.
Similar coronae that form around the Sun are typically harder to see because of the Sun's great brightness.