Refraction

Hi, I took some pictures of the sky with optical phenomena. One, I took with a friends Iphone and its pretty good quality and it could only clearly be seen while wearing sunglasses. The other two I took with my blackberry, so unfortunately it isn't as good of quality and I believe they're sundogs. But I don't know it looks kinda different than the ones Ive seen on the internet. The third is a close up of one of the second pictures. All tho not clearly noticeable in the pictures both clearly had three different colors and were taken with in a week of each other.
What do you guy think?

P.S. I don't know if this would be the right forum but I live in Chicago and we get chem/contrails. Maby what ever it is has a specific refraction index

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Nice shots.

1st one is a sun halo

2nd one looks like a iridescent cloud - essentially a rainbow caused by ice or water crystals in the sky

3rd one looks like a sun dog on a halo

& the 4th one also looks like a sun dog - but may just be iridescence.

All are pretty common - if you search google images for any of those terms you'll get hundreds of photos & they've been known for centuries.

reply to post by BriGuyTM90


Well, living in Chicago, you have a lot of air traffic, being in the midwest means your weather changes a lot so you are seeing lots of contrails. "Chemtrails" are an internet hoax until someone produces some conclusive evidence otherwise. It hasn't been found yet.

That said, there is a great site, something one of my online friends, a professional aviation photographer linked me to, called Atmospheric Optics
It has picture, names and explanations of everything I've ever seen in the daytime sky. It's onne of the most beautiful informative sites out there for knowing what you see in the atmosphere.