A Rainbow around the sun?

Question

I was at school and during lunch when i was playing basketball. I looked up at the sun. I dont know why i just did. And i saw a rainbow around the sun. I`ve seen it before,only once but I was just curiouse. Why is their a rainbow around the sun? and What caused it to be like that.

For those of you who dont know whta i`m talking about
heres an image that i found on photobucket.Its not mine but it looks exactly like The 'Rainbow around the sun' during lunch. Oh yeah but the clouds were crazy.there were crazy designes all over the sky.
so anyway here.
http://th177.photobucket.com/albums/w216/franzgallic/Different%20Stuff/th_DSC01056.jpg

Answer 1

http://www.srh.noaa.gov/oun/wxevents/20050210/

Rare Optical Display over Southern Plains
during the Late Afternoon of February 10, 2005
A combination of a late afternoon sun and a thin layer of high-level clouds produced some rare and spectacular optical displays in the late afternoon skies over Oklahoma on February 10, 2005. The displays, consisting of bright spots, arcs, and halos with rainbow-like colors, sent quite a few meteorologists scrambling for their text books on atmospheric optics, simply because some of the phenomena that were seen are so rare that even scientists in the area had never seen them before.

Although some of the colored arcs resembled rainbows, none of them were true rainbows. Rainbows are created by sunlight that is reflected by raindrops, and therefore always appears on the opposite side of the viewer than the sun. In other words, the observer will be between the sun and a rainbow. However, the effects seen this afternoon were created by refraction, or bending, of sunlight through ice crystals that make up the cirrus clouds overspreading the area. The exact shape, structure, and orientation of the ice crystals, and the elevation of the sun in the sky, are what determine which of the various optical effects can be seen.

The two bright spots on either side of the sun were sun dogs. The scientific name is parhelia. They occur when the main axes of the ice crystals in the cloud layer are oriented vertically, or up and down. This results in sunlight being refracted at an angle equal to the elevation angle of the sun. Therefore, the sun dogs appear at the same elevation in the sky as the sun itself.

The sun dogs were within a larger ring of light that encircled the sun. This ring, with the sun at the center, is called a 22-degree halo, and is one of the more common of the many optical phenomena that were observed this afternoon. The name derives from the fact that there is a 22-degree angle between the observer and any 2 points on opposite sides of the halo.

At the top of the 22-degree halo was another relatively bright arc, directly above the sun, which was quite short and bent the opposite way as the halo itself. This is known as a tangent arc.

Beyond the 22-degree halo was another larger halo known as a 46-degree halo. This halo is seen far less often than the 22-degree halo.

Above the 46 degree halo was yet another arc of colored light that intersected the 46-degree halo at its highest point in the sky, but arced in the opposite direction. This is a rare phenomenon known as a circumzenithal arc. Had the arc continued all the way around to form a full circle, the center of the circle would be directly overhead at the highest point in the sky, or the zenith. These arcs usually are short in both length and duration, and are usually faint. But the one seen this afternoon was unusually bright and colorful, and lasted for almost an hour.

More information on these atmospheric phenomena can be found at the Atmospheric Optics website. ( http://www.atoptics.co.uk/ )

Answer 2

It is not a rainbow but a 22° halo. It is caused by sunlight being refracted by ice crystals in a veil of cirrostratus cloud across the sky. The ice crystals are the commonest with faces at 60°. Other halo phenomena can occur with sundogs or parhelia another common one. These are brightly coloured spots either side of the sun on the 22° halo. In polar regions, the ice crystals in the air can produce spectacular halo displays with many rings, arcs, pillars and false suns.

Answer 3

We saw a sun ring rainbow while traveling through western China -- the Gobi desert. While regular rainbows are caused by sunlight passing prism like though raindrops -- the sun ring rainbow we saw was caused by sunlight passing through a very thin cloud of ice crystals.

Answer 4

All rainbows are caused when the moisture in the air distorts the light traveling through it. (Like after it rains and the sun comes out, then you'll see a rainbow.) Sometimes rainbows can appear before a rain storm or even on a really humid evening.

Answer 5

Someone posted earlier that it is caused by moisture within the atmosphere, and that is correct.

Water droplets refract and produce the color spectrum: ROYBGIV (red, orange, yellow, blue, green, indigo, violet).

Rainbows are always full circles, only when you see them on the ground, the earth cuts off half of them.

Answer 6

same as regular rainbow. It's just that wispy cirrus clouds bend the sunlight and make a rainbow.