photo #5653589

On a frosty morning in Golden Valley, Nevada, US, Danielle Bailey (Member 60,139) watched the sky brighten from dark purple to red and then gold. Then the delicate striations of the Altocumulus cloud that the Sun shone through began to develop mother-of-pearl colourations like nothing she’d seen before. The colours are known as cloud iridescence, and they can appear when the sunlight shines through a thin cloud made of particularly small and consistently sized droplets. Their scattering effect on the light, which is known as diffraction, can cause the visible wavelengths to be separated out to appear as wavy bands of pastel hues. For a short while on this particular morning, Danielle’s location could have been renamed ‘Multicolor Valley, Nevada’.