Ok, I live in melbourne Australia and last night happened to glance at the moon, apart from noticing a very bright Jupiter i also noticed a literally perfect circle around the moon, It literally looked like someone had grabbed a pen and drawn a perfect circle around it, Has anyone else in any other part of the world noticed it?
Anonymous
Favorite Answer
It's called a moon ring or moon-bow, created by ice crystals high in the stratosphere.
If you are lucky, you may catch one complete moon bow 22 degrees away from and around the moon, and another complete or partial moon-bow 44 degrees away from the moon. The ice crystals act like raindrops do when creating a rainbow, Some times a moon-bow will have a red outer edge.
Chris G
I'm from near Melbourne as well, and what you saw was the beautiful 22° halo that is caused by the moon's light refracting through high level ice crystals. It was gone by 11:00PM where I live, as the more dense cloud rolled in.
Â
doug4jets
It's a thin layer of ice crystals at a certain altitude which creates this glowing circle. Quite common. Beautiful too.
eri
Sounds like a halo - you get that from certain types of thin clouds in the atmosphere. It's a local effect - only people near you would have seen it, but I've seen it many times before.
turtlepwned
I live in canada .. I think I have but thought it was just fog or something. but the moon does have a face