What is Pilot's Glory? Explaining the rainbow-like halo around an airplane's shadow | Hey Ray

Sometimes, you look up to the sky, and you see something weird. Other times, you look down from up in the sky, and you see something extremely weird! That happened to Edna.

On a recent flight, she saw something weird, and asked, "I was wondering if you could explain this. I was looking out my window during my flight looking down on the clouds. I saw a reflection of the plane with a prism of colors around it."

Edna did see something weird, and this is a phenomenon that has many different names. Pilot's Glory, Glory of the Pilot, or Pilot's Halo are the most common terms for this. The circular rainbow is caused by the same processes that create rainbows on the ground. 

When sunlight hits the tiny cloud droplets, which are a liquid, they act as a prism, breaking up the light into all the colors that make it up. You see it as a circle because you are looking at it from up high.  We showed you this in a previous Hey Ray! 

The other weird thing is the shadow of the jet in the middle of the rainbow.

Since you need to be between the Sun and the rain drops or cloud droplets to see the rainbow, you are seeing the shadow of the aircraft projected right into the middle of the rainbow, making for a really cool phenomenon. 

Types of glories were recorded long before human flight.

Explorers climbing mountains noticed them at times when fog was clearing, and the sun was at their backs, a ghost-like figure of themselves would appear, surrounded by a rainbow halo. While the science is the same as a Pilot's Glory, the Mount Washington Observatory says these are referred to as a "brocken spectre" or "mountain spectre".

Whether you are seeing ghost-like figures on a mountain top or there is a plane shadow following you around during your flight, you need to be close enough to a cloud for this phenomenon to occur.

Edna, that was a glorious question about glories!