PREVIEW

A photographer has captured the incredible moment a rainbow appeared in clouds below her flight. Joann Randles was flying from Bristol to Madeira when she noticed the weather phenomenon, also known as “pilot's glory”. A Pilot's Glory is an optical phenomenon where a halo appears to encircle a plane's shadow against clouds caused by the backscattering of sunlight by tiny water droplets in the atmosphere. The phenomenon requires the viewer to be directly between the source of light and the water droplets with the size and distribution of the droplets affecting the appearance of the glory. The main cause of a glory is a process called wave tunnelling, where sunlight creates electromagnetic waves within a droplet which then bounce around inside and eventually exit, forming the visible halo.