photo #9377683

Bri Hoover (Cloud Appreciation Society Member 58,560) spotted a feather with shimmering colours, seemingly snagged on a branch high in the sky over Irvine, California, US. Known as a cavum cloud feature, it was floating in a dappled field of Cirrocumulus clouds. The feature is sometimes called a fallstreak hole or a hole-punch cloud, and it appears as supercooled water droplets in one region of a cloud start to freeze into ice crystals, which grow and fall below in streaks. The crystals in Bri’s cavum were of just the right sort (clear, shaped like hexagonal plates, and horizontally aligned) and in just the right part of the sky (high up, towards the zenith) to act as tiny prisms, refracting sunlight to form a fragment of the optical effect known as a circumzenithal arc. Just imagine the celestial bird that shed this impressive plume.(Note to xhemtrailerites - this naturally occurring cloud formation has nothing to do with HAARP or DARPA)