Is That A St. Patrick’s Day Moonbow?

If you have some rain today for St. Patrick’s Day, you may get to see a rare weather phenomenon.

A pot of gold at the end of a rainbow is often a part of St. Patrick’s Day decorations, but have you seen a moonbow? A moonbow is like a solar rainbow but is created by moonlight refracted through water droplets in the air.

Moonbows only happen when the Full Moon is fairly low in the sky and rain is opposite the Moon, so it might be visible tonight or tomorrow in the hours after sunset when the sky is dark.

If there is a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, I wonder what you would find at the end of a moonbow.

A moonbow over the town of Kihei, seen from Kula, on Maui, Hawaii – Photo Credit:  Arne-kaiser

Published by

Ken

A lifelong educator on and off the Internet. Random by design and predictably irrational. It's turtles all the way down. Dolce far niente.

Add to the conversation about this article

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.