Here the circumzenithal arc is visible above, along with the 22 degree sun halo, which also sports sun dogs on the left and right of the circle.
I’m posting this almost two years after I saw an extraordinary sun halo over Florida’s west coast — at Treasure Island, on the Gulf of Mexico, in October 2023. Sometimes life gets in the way of ye olde blog, but when I stumbled across these photos recently (I’m writing this in August 2025 but backdating the post), I had to add them to the gallery.
I’m always looking for sun halos and have seen a couple of amazing ones in Florida. One was in my neighborhood on the Space Coast in 2021. This one on the west coast in 2023 was of stunning clarity.
A halo forms when light interacts with ice crystals in the upper atmosphere, usually in cirrus or cirrostratus clouds. In colder climates, especially, extraordinarily complex halos are sometimes seen with the help of “diamond dust” ice crystals in the air. So it’s always a special treat to see them in warmer climates.
Conditions were just right this day, with lots of cirrus in the sky, producing not just the 22-degree halo but other halo phenomena. The upside-down rainbow above is the circumzenithal arc. The faint arc below it in some of the photos is a supralateral arc or possibly a 46 degree halo. The smaller round halo is the more common 22 degree halo. Sun dogs are the bright effects on either side of this circle, seen in the photos taken closer to sunset.
The palm trees added that special visual ingredient for photos – and I even caught a plane crossing the halo at its crispest. Photos of the sunset from the previous day and the stars that night are just a bonus.
