September 16, 2019
The light from the farthest visible stars set out on its journey long before your first birthday.
A Lunar Corona over Turin
Birthday · September 16, 2019
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APOD published September 16, 2019. Credit: Giorgia Hofer (Cortina Astronomical Association). A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
What are those colorful rings around the Moon? A corona. Rings like this will sometimes appear when the Moon is seen through thin clouds. The effect is created by the quantum mechanical diffraction of light around individual, similarly-sized water droplets in an intervening but mostly-transparent cloud. Since light of different colors has different wavelengths, each color diffracts differently. Lunar Coronae are one of the few quantum mechanical color effects that can be easily seen with the unaided eye. The featured lunar corona was captured around full Moon above Turin, Italy in 2014. Similar coronae that form around the Sun are usually harder to see because of the Sun's great brightness.
Image credit: Giorgia Hofer (Cortina Astronomical Association)