John Michael Strubhart’s Reviews > The Cloud Collector's Handbook > Status Update

Sun’s elevation: below 30 degrees from the horizon, but best when at 22 degrees.

Sundogs always appear level with the Sun.

The distance from Sun or Moon to the edge of the ring is equivalent to the outstretched span of a hand held up at arm’s length.

Cloudbows are like rainbows, but with much paler colors. In fact, they often don’t show any discernible colors at all—looking like albino rainbows, or the ghosts of rainbows past.

Convection clouds are the best sort for making rainbows, as they’re more likely to produce showers when the sky around is clear, allowing direct sunlight to shine on them.

The perspective can make the legs of your shadow flare out so, what with the multicolored halo, it looks like a ghost from the 1970s.

Closely related to cloud iridescence, coronae are caused when the light is diffracted as it passes around a cloud’s particles. Only if these are all very small and the cloud layer is thin will the colors of the corona appear distinct around the central bright disc. The smaller the cloud droplets, the larger the corona.

To claim that every cloud has a silver lining is therefore wrong—some have tutti-frutti-colored ones.

Noctilucent clouds form in the mesosphere, at altitudes of 30 to 50 miles—almost at the limit of the atmosphere.

Forming 10 to 20 miles up, in the stratosphere, at –121 degrees F, nacreous clouds show beautiful iridescent pastel hues as they scatter the light from the Sun when it is just below the horizon.