Fire Rainbow: Leaving Lake Medora

As we were leaving Lake Medora for the end of the summer, about about 4:00 in the afternoon, we saw a beautiful mackerel sky.  (Picture from the car.)

Then the sun came in at an angle and suddenly produced this array of colors.  We pulled over and I tried to capture it (though I didn't have the right filter) before it fled.  Here is a sense  of what we saw.

PS  A Fire Rainbow is really a Circumhorizontal Arc.  Per Wikipedia:

"The misleading term "fire rainbow" . . . is neither a rainbow, nor related in any way to fire. The term. . . may originate in the occasional appearance of the arc as "flames" in the sky, when it occurs in fragmentary cirrus clouds."  In reality,

"A circumhorizontal arc is an optical phenomenon that belongs to the family of ice halos formed by the refraction of sun- or moonlight in plate-shaped ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere, typically in cirrus or cirrostratus clouds. In its full form, the arc has the appearance of a large, brightly spectrum-coloured band (red being the topmost colour) running parallel to the horizon, located far below the Sun or Moon. The distance between the arc and the Sun or Moon is twice as far as the common 22-degree halo. Often, when the halo-forming cloud is small or patchy, only fragments of the arc are seen. As with all halos, it can be caused by the Sun as well as (but much more rarely) by the Moon."

Whatever it was, it was a gorgeous farewell to summer and  to the lake!

#FireRainbow
#LakeMedora
#LeavingTheLake
#PureMichigan