h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This is going to be hard to type as Ganesh has taken a liking to the shea butter I just used and is insistently trying to sniff/lick/rub and otherwise totally experience the smell of it in a catlike fashion.

Yesterday I was irradiating the nearly naked carcass with solar emissions at the local park, doing the cholesterol conversion thing as only the melanin-impaired can do, and I noticed a contrail across the sky. This is fairly unusual nowadays, as most local training flights aren't happening, as the spare airplanes in question are now over Iraq, so I took the opportunity to inspect the sky. There were two large clouds, thin as theater scrim, tossed across the sky like two gauzy dropcloths. One was very high, higher than the contrail and at an angle to it, and had a linear pattern traced into it like a glass etching. The lower one also had structure, but more like a rucked-up static clingy skirt, and it was at 30 degrees to the other.

The day was quite sunny warm, and calm at ground level, so if you didn't look up, you'd never have seen the clouds. And, you'd never have seen the compound sunbow. It wasn't a complete circle like you would expect for a moonbow, and parts of the arc were in the upper layer of cloud that weren't in the lower cloud and vice versa, adding a strange 1/2 dimension to the whole thing.

Beautiful.

Sounds like you caught a pretty sight
I like catching the various halos, partial halos, sundogs and so on. Then again I do live pretty much under a heavily used air corridor - one that ends at a major UK international airport about 15-20 miles away - so I do get to see quite a few.

http://www.sundog.clara.co.uk/atoptics/phenom.htm

Cool site! Thanks Phil. Now that I know the names, I can say that what I saw was a circumzenithal arc at 60 degrees, with only one weak sundog visible on the right.

I could lose myself in that site for hours

Ooh, lovely. I have seen some sun dogs on various occasions, but only once have I seen a glory, and that was when I was flying back from Copenhagen.