photo #5971253

This F-35A jet aircraft produced a cloud with iridescent colours at an airshow in Fort Worth, Texas, US. As the pilot made a steep vertical climb, extreme high pressure would have developed in the air below the wings and extreme low pressure in the air above them. The air cools rapidly in low pressure like this, which can cause some of its moisture to form into droplets of cloud that are very small and uniform in size, since each droplet appears only for a fraction of a second before evaporating away again as it passes out of the low-pressure zone. Cloud droplets that are tiny and consistently sized like this diffract, or bend, sunlight that shines through, separating the visible wavelengths to appear as iridescent bands of colour.Cloud iridescence produced by F-35 Heritage Flight Team pilot Capt. Andrew ‘Dojo’ Olson and photographed by Senior Airman Alexander Cook. This US Air Force photo was suggested to us by Timothy Kessler (Cloud Appreciation Society Member 45,331).