Usually a glory is perfectly round, but sometimes it can be deformed to such a degree that it is hardly recognizable as such. In this article we discuss some examples of deformed glories.

The attached pdf is a preprint of an article published in Weather. A pdf of its published version is located on the link www.interscience.wiley.com/weather. On request it is also be available from the authors.

The anomalous red twilights observed in mid-February 2008 over Western Europe can be attributed to the presence of a large field of Stratospheric Polar Clouds (PSCs). The vertical sounding of De Bilt indicates that a tropospheric high pressure system triggered an excess stratospheric cooling. Pictures of the twilight taken from several spots are shown.

The attached pdf is a preprint of an article published in Weather. A pdf of its published version is located on the link www.interscience.wiley.com/weather. On request it is also available from the authors

The limiting magnitude during totality is +3.5. Diffraction coronas and even halos around the totally eclipsed sun may nevertheless occur. Rainbows during totality seem impossible.

An isolated colourless spot of 1° diameter located at the antisolar point was observed from a plane on the clouds beneath it. The spot can be explained by light scattering on randomly oriented ice crystals, via light paths similar to those responsible for the subparhelic circle. Its peculiar polarization properties potentially enable its detecting in cases where the spot is embedded in a glory.

The two Rome halo displays of 1629 and 1630 are prominent in the early halo literature, and the 1629 display is still cited today for having contained a 28° circular halo. We have examined seventeenth century correspondence and publications in order to learn as much as possible about the existing documentation of the two displays. We find the documentation to be too weak to support a definitive interpretation of either display, and we see little evidence for a 28° halo or for other rare halos. The two displays remain important for their role in initiating modern halo science.

A response is given to a Letter by G. Watts questioning the identification of subsuns in general and of the bright steak on Mars in terms of halo scattering.

A bright subsun is spotted on a satellite picture of Mars. To our knowledge this is the first time that a halo is identified on a picture of a planet other than the Earth.

There is an ancient myth that the light in Holland is different from anywhere else. It's the legendary light we see in old Dutch paintings. The reality of this elusive effect is discussed by several people. My explanation is that the light is just a contrast effect, cause by the flat and featureless Dutch landscape which attracts the eyes to the near-horizon sky, where remote cumulus clouds can a spectacular sight. (versions in English, Dutch, German, French, and Spanish)

NB: This documentary won in 2003 a ‘Gouden Kalf' award

The prospects of the Huygens probe to detect during its descent halos from methane or ethane crystals on Titan are discussed. Diagrams of potential halo displays on Titan are shown.

It is found that halo displays are always left-right (L-R) symmetric if the crystals are formed from the surrounding vapor. This leaves room for two types of halo display only: a full symmetric one (mmm -symmetric), and a partial symmetric one (mm2 -symmetric) in which halo constituents lack their counterparts on the other side of the parhelic circle. Partial symmetric displays can occur only for point halos and only if the halo-making crystals lack a center of inversion, any rotatory-inversion axis that is parallel to the crystal spin axis P, a mirror plane perpendicular to the P axis, and a twofold rotation axis perpendicular to the P axis. A simple conceptual method is presented to reconstruct possible shapes of the halo-generating crystals from the halos in the display. Halos that may occur on the Saturnian satellite Titan are briefly discussed.

Polarization and radiance profiles of parhelia were measured as a function of scattering angle. The wavelength dependence of the width of the parhelion polarization peak agrees with Fraunhofer diffraction theory, indicating that the broadening of the halos is caused primarily by diffraction. Hence our hypothesis that a spread of interfacial angles is the dominating cause of halo broadening, has proved untenable. The conflicting results between the width of the halo polarization peaks and the observed size distribution of the replicated crystals originates from a strong size-dependent collection efficiency in the sampling. This implies that shapes of sampled crystals need not necessarily be representative for the shapes of the halo-making crystals in a swarm.

Systematics of the Novaya Zemlya (NZ) effect are discussed in the context of sunsets. We distinguish full mirages, exhibiting oscillatory light paths and their onsets, the subcritical mirages. Ray-tracing examples and sequences of solar images are shown. We discuss two historical observations by Fridtjof Nansen and by Vivian Fuchs, and we report a recent South Pole observation of the NZ effect for the Moon.

Ray-tracing analyses show that the NZ effect distorted the relative positions of Jupiter and the Moon in such a way that the looked-for fingerprint of the 1597 conjunction occurred almost 2 h after the true conjunction. The quoted direction for the apparent Moon-Jupiter conjunction is then found to be accurate to within 1°. This delay of the apparent conjunction largely explains the error of 29° in their longitude determination. The truthfulness of the observations brackening the first recording of the NZ effect, debated for four centuries, now appears to be beyond doubt.

We describe a general framework for systematically treating halos that are due to refraction in preferentially oriented ice wedges, and we construct an atlas of such halos. The atlas is thus a very general collection of refraction halos that includes known halos as a small fraction. Each halo in the atlas is characterized by three parameters: the wedge angle, the zenith angle of the spin vector, and the spin vector expressed in the wedge frame. The theory reveals order in what seems initially to be a staggering variety of halo shapes, and in particular it explains why halos look the way they do.

In the caption to a Weather-picture of a parhelion reflected on a water surface it was suggested that the polarization difference between sky and parhelion enhanced the contrast. I show that this effect does not lead any perceptible enhancement of the contrast.

The direction of the inner-edge polarization of a halo can serve as an observational diagnostic for determining the actual nature of a halo arc if two competing explanations exist. The observation can be decisive for the identification of a spot that might be either a 44° parhelion or a 46° parhelion, of an arc that might be either a 22° sunvex Parry arc or a 20° Parroid arc arising from plate-oriented pyramidal crystals, and of an arc that might be either a 22° suncave Parry arc or a 23° Parroid arc from plate-oriented pyramidal crystals. Practical hints are given for observing visually the inner-edge polarization of halos.

Parhelic circles due to plate-oriented crystals (hence, with main axes vertical) and 120° parhelia change in position when viewed through a rotating polarizer. The parhelic circle moves vertically; its largest shift is found at an azimuthal distance between 90° and 120° from the Sun. The 120° parhelia move both vertically and horizontally. The magnitudes of the shifts are between 0.1° and 0.3°, depending on solar elevation. The mechanism is polarization-sensitive internal reflection by prism faces of the ice crystals. We outline the theory and present three visual and one instrumental observation of the displacements of these halos in polarized light.

Preannouncement of our unifying halo theory, published later in Appl. Opt. 38, 1552-1625 (1999).

Polarization and radiance profiles of refraction halos were measured as a function of scattering angle. The width of the halo polarization peaks conflicts the observed size distribution of the replicated crystals. This discrepancy can be explained if the interfacial angles are not always exact integer multiples of 60°, but have an average deviation from this value of 0.49° ± 0.05°.

Scanning the polarization of Venus at scattering angles 18-32° and at wavelengths 402-850 nm, we found a dip in polarization in the scattering angle range 23-25° for wavelengths 622 nm and longer. The width of the dip was 1-3°, its magnitude 0.4% in degree of polarization. The dip is consistent with the occurrence of a halo in the Venus atmosphere due to H₂SO₄-contaminated ice crystals in the upper haze layer of Venus. It remains unclear however why the halo is manifesting itself only at long wavelengths.

Preliminary results on the Antarctic halo project performed at US Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station (season 1989/90) and the Russian station Vostok (season 1990/91) are described.

See the abstract of Endeavor New Series 10, 121-124 (1986)

The linear polarization and intensity of a 22° halo has been measured simultaneously at seven wavelengths as a function of scattering angle. The polarization pattern is found to be dominated by a narrow peak centered at the halo angle. Its width indicate a effective diameter of the hexagonal face of the halo-generating crystals is found to be 41 and 54 μm for two separate scans. Halo angles could be determined with precisions better than 0.05°. An independent single-wavelength parhelion observation indicates a stronger polarization peak concentrated in an even smaller angular scattering range and a crystal diameter of 220 μm.

An account is given about our attempts at La Palma Observatory to detect ice crystals in the Venus's atmosphere, including the drawback of a temporary instrumental malfunction and our subsequent fortune that we got the opportunity to scan a terrestrial halo in a Venus-spoiling cirrus deck.

The polarization distribution in the sky during a total solar eclipse is calculated with a simple secondary light scattering model. The model can explain various observations during totality, including the measurements by Shaw of the polarization distribution of the sky in the solar vertical during the 1973 total eclipse.

The secondary rainbow scattering angle for spheroidal drops of water is virtually independent of aspect ratio for most visible wavelengths. For most solar heights the residual aspect-ratio dependence shifts the bow toward a smaller deviation angle if the drop size increases. These two facts explain why the supernumeraries of the secondary rainbow are never seen in rain showers. At high solar elevations the flattening of drops results in a shift of the secondary rainbow toward a larger deviation angle. This shift is still large enough to cause the formation of the first supernumerary in red light. This red supernumerary of the secondary rainbow may be observable by eye in natural showers if a red filter is used to remove the obscuring contribution of shorter wavelengths to the light of the rainbow.

In the open, we are surrounded no only by a mass of colour, but also by much polarization. The latter remains normally invisible to us, but with the aid of a  simple polarizing sheet, one suddenly becomes aware how much polarization there is. In this article, a number of observations are described and regularities in the natural polarization pattern are discussed.

An outline is given of polarization of natural phenomena, like the blue sky, rainbows, halos, beetles and reflections. The effects are illustrated with 89 pictures.

The intensity distributions of halos as a function of scattering angle are found to depend on the number of degrees of freedom of the generating set of crystals. The polarization of refraction halos as a function of scattering angle is calculated, in which birefringence is taken into account. The polarization of parhelia and tangent arcs shows a strong maximum near the inner edge of the halo over an angular range of 0.1°, followed by a similar maximum of reversed polarization at 0.5° from the first one. The 22° halo polarization shows a less strong maximum near its edge over an angular range of 0.5°. Halos at 46° from the sun also show a strong polarization near their inner edges, but the direction of the polarization is perpendicular to the polarization of the 22° halo edges.

The Airy theory of the rainbow is extended to polarized light. The degree of polarization of the rainbow is less than expected from geometrical optics; it increases with droplet size. For a droplet diameter >1 mm the locations of the supernumerary rainbows are equal for both polarization directions, but for a diameter <1 mm the supernumerary rainbows of the weaker polarization component are located between those in the strong component.

Because of birefringence, 22° halos consist of two polarised components, mutually shifted by 0.11°, which is about one quarter of the angle subtended by the moon. By rotating a polarizer before the naked eye we could be easily observed that the halo's inner boundary is about 0.1° closer to the sun for polarized light for which the E vector is radial with respect to the sun. To our knowledge, observations of this kind have never been published.

The shadow of the annual eclipse of 29 April 1976 stands clearly out against the Sahara on the picture taken on 09:37 UT by the NOOA-4 weather satellite.

A bright subsun was spotted on the image taken by the ESSA-8 weather satellite. The subsun appeared on a frontal system east of Greenland. To our knowledge this is the first time that a halo is identified on satellite picture of the Earth.

We observed and photographed from a plane a parhelion, a subparhelion and a vertical arc connecting these two.

A double tangent arc was observed above the setting sun and photographed with a 17-mm lens. The mutual distance between the arcs was 1.7°. The distance to the sun of the lower component of 21.5° indicate that it is an ordinary tangent arc to the 22° halo. The upper component might have been either a tangent arc to the 24½° halo or a Parry arc II. The shape and distance to the sun rules the first possibility out.

Normalerweise ist eine Glorie kreisrund, aber manchmal ist sie so deformiert, daß sie als Glorie kaum noch identifizierbar ist. In diesem Artikel werden Beispiele von leicht bis stark deformierten Glorien aufgezeigt.