After The Storm

While I was in Lake George last week, I captured this cool phenomenon in the sky.These colorful clouds are called iridescent clouds, and the phenomenon is called cloud iridescence oririsation. The term comes from Iris, the Greek personification of the rainbow. It’s similar to the colors you might see when oil lies on the surface of a puddle of water. When you see a cloud like this, you know there are especially tiny ice crystals or water droplets in the air. Larger ice crystals produce solar or lunar halos, but tiny ice crystals or water droplets cause light to be diffracted – spread out – creating this rainbow-like effect in the clouds.