~ Colourful corona around the Sun and rainbow iridescent clouds ~

​I’m always looking up at the sky to see if there’s something spectacular happening, on the 26th September just before midday I was rewarded with seeing these pretty coloured concentric circles around the Sun. I knew straight away that it was a corona, which is produced by uniform size water droplets from cirrus type clouds in the sky.
 
I had nothing to shield the Suns light except with my fingers, with the other hand I took the photo.

~ Colourful corona around the Sun ~

~ Pretty rainbow iridescent coloured clouds ~

About an hour later, the sky changed again and this time the high cirrus cloud was a lot thinner and the suns light was diffracted through the very small droplets of water and ice crystals in the clouds to produce the pretty rainbow iridescent coloured clouds.
 
I picked a little plant to hold up and cover the Suns disc so as to capture some of the beautiful colours, and then with my other hand I took the photo.
 
If you look closely in the top left and right hand corners of the photo above, you’ll see a small part of the 22-degree halo…the camera I used was not wide enough to capture more of this wider circle of light.
 
There is always something happening in the sky…so don’t forget to look up as you may be very surprised at what you see :-)
 
If you would like to know more about optical sky phenomenon’s then please go to Les Cowley’s excellent website at: http://www.atoptics.co.uk/droplets/corona.htm