It's funny what tiny little ice crystals can do. Floating high in the air, suspended by air currents, they hang there... and then a ray of sunshine enters them. The light gets bent due to complicated physics, the interplay of that beam of light passing from air to a solid crystal and out again. But once that beam leaves, the sky can light up with a wizard's pattern of colors and shapes. And if you're very, very lucky, you'll see something that you'll remember the rest of your life. Something like this:
Holy diffractionation! [Click to heliocanesenate.] Mind you, this picture is real. David Hathaway - appropriately enough, a solar physicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama - took it using a wide-angle lens to get the whole thing. It's a High Dynamic Range shot, meaning he combined pictures with 3 different exposure times to see both ...
