October 29, 2014
A birthday is what happens when cosmic time briefly puts down the scale of eons and pays attention to a single human year.
Iridescent Cloud Edge Over Colorado
Birthday · October 29, 2014
A little universe, just for you
Your date.
Ready to give.
Free PNG · 1080 × 1350 · No account needed
Image rights and credit requirements apply when sharing or reusing imagery.
Date & occasion only
Change the year
APOD published October 29, 2014. Credit: Phil Plait (Bad Astronomy Blog, Slate). A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Sometimes your eclipse viewing goes bad in an interesting way. While watching and photographing last Thursday's partial solar eclipse, a popular astronomy blogger suffered through long periods of clouds blocking the Sun. Unexpectedly, however, a nearby cloud began to show a rare effect: iridescence. Frequently part of a more familiar solar corona effect, iridescence is the diffraction of sunlight around a thin screen of nearly uniformly-sized water droplets. Different colors of the sunlight become deflected by slightly different angles and so come to the observer from slightly different directions. This display, featured here, was quite bright and exhibited an unusually broad range of colors. On the right, the contrails of an airplane are also visible. APOD Wall Calendar: Weather and Volcanoes
Image credit: Phil Plait (Bad Astronomy Blog, Slate)