Large Artificial Glory


The fog lifted while I was trying to image an artificial fogbow. I was just about to pack up when I noticed another large but faint colourless arc. It was smaller than the fogbow I had seen earlier but much larger than the glory.

Large artificial glory

This exposure (without polariser) shows that it was in fact a very large glory - there was no sign of a fogbow outside it.

The large size would seem to be due to unusually small droplets, radius around 1 micron instead of the more typical 5 to 10 microns in fog.

Artificial glory and fogbow

This image shows a portion of fogbow taken 10 minutes earlier (with a polariser) and is to the same scale.

A glory is visible at the centre of the fogbow and this shows just how large the later one was. The thicker fog also means the spectre appears closer.

The large glory has a radius half that of the fogbow while the small glory has a radius about one eighth of the fogbow.


Canon EOS 20D    6th November 2006
Wiltshire, England

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