June 19, 2006—It looks like a rainbow that's been set on fire, but this phenomenon is as cold as ice.

Known in the weather world as a circumhorizontal arc, this rare sight was caught on film on June 3 as it hung over northern Idaho near the Washington State border (map of Idaho).

The arc isn't a rainbow in the traditional sense—it is caused by light passing through wispy, high-altitude cirrus clouds. The sight occurs only when the sun is very high in the sky (more than 58° above the horizon). What's more, the hexagonal ice crystals that make up cirrus clouds must be shaped like thick plates with their faces parallel to the ground.

When light enters through a vertical side face of such an ice crystal and leaves from the bottom face, it refracts, or bends, in the same way that light passes through a prism. If a cirrus's crystals are aligned just right, the whole cloud lights up in a spectrum of colors.

This particular arc spanned several hundred square miles of sky and lasted for about an hour, according to the London Daily Mail.

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I actually saw something very similar to this in July last year in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. It was neat, but by the time we found a camera it was pretty much gone.

That is absolutely beautemous, magnifically wondermous! That is something you see almost every day where there is an uplift in the cirrus clouds during the winter (or it could be June after a cool rain day) at the end of the day. The sun has to be shining at a low angle to cause a rainbow in the water filled atmosphere. Cirrus clouds and any other clouds are water droplets and cirrus clouds are frozen water droplets and the frozen droplet becomes a prism. This is the easiest introduction to quantum physics. The spin of the quark in the atom in the water reacting to the wave of light from the sun.

They do say that the sun has to be high in the atmosphere though, and I'm not sure what they mean. The sun has to be at the right angle to cause the prism effect, ice is a hexagonal crystal, a six-sided crystal. The puffy clouds under the cirrus clouds are cumulus clouds or 'scud' from a passing storm.

Praise Jehovah in the make-up of this earth. Prior to about 85 million years ago, a man could be so hypnotized by looking into the sky, but the sky fell and a whole bunch of meteors hit for some reason. Maybe it was a natural thing to happen and we weren't protected against comets like we think we are now.