Ring the Moon

Please thank ice crystals in high clouds for the lovely ring around the moon last night.

The iPhone did a surprisingly good job capturing the ring, but it was too wide to capture in one shot. Luckily I fished out my fish-eye lens (and applied some judicious filtering to cut down the grain).

@rrmutt pointed to nice diagram explaining how the whole ring thing works (please substitute moon for sun):

More here.

Not bad, but we can do better — despite the temperature dropping to the MID FORTIES, I ventured outside long enough to try some longer exposures with my trusty old Lumix. 15 seconds did the trick:

That’s Jupiter on the right of the full icebow. (The dot immediately to the right of the moon is just lens flair since I didn’t line up the shot perfectly.)

And as @rrmutt noted, you can see the refraction!

http://twitter.com/rrmutt/status/284735855384481792

Zoom and enhance:

And thus concludes today’s lesson in atmospheric optics.