Arizona Travel

I took this photo the other day while flying over Arizona, and the following video contains highlights of the trip home at 30,000 feet. I wasn’t quite sure what I was seeing outside the plane. Seemed to be a series of circular rainbows being cast from above. I asked Phil about it and he wrote back:

Nice! That’s called a glory. It’s caused by refraction (bending of light) inside cloud droplets. You have to be looking in the exact opposite direction of the Sun to see them; can you see the plane’s shadow in the middle? The best part is when you see them as you’re landing; the shadow gets bigger as you approach the cloud, but the glory stays the same size. If it works out well you can actually see that the glory is centered around your position on the plane (if you’re sitting toward the back, the glory is off-center toward the back of the plane). I’ve seen this a few times and it always makes me smile.

It was the perfect punctuation mark for an already-amazing view from above. Arizona looks amazing from the air, as I attempted to document (you’ll find this Glory at the end of this video):