Yesterday,
April 25th, we experienced something so incredible and I’m thrilled
that Michael was able to capture this phenomenon with his camera.
When we
arrived for lunch, we saw a couple of people taking pictures of the sky and I
wondered to Michael what that was all about.
When we sat down, there were beautiful cloud formations so I figured
that’s what they were looking at.
While we
ate, Michael happened to look directly up and saw what looked like a circular
rainbow. We were under the awning so he
walked to the railing, looked up, and saw what we came to learn from our good
friend, Ronnie, was a “22 Degree Halo.”
Except for one passenger, who couldn’t tell us what it was, no one had
ever seen anything like this. We heard
words like “corona,” “halo,” “crown” but no one could say for sure what it
was. Later that evening, we showed our
photos to others who hadn’t been outside, and they had never seen anything like
it either.
When I sent
the photo to Ronnie and he sent back the name, I immediately looked on our
world map in our room and, sure enough, we were located at 22 degrees latitude
just traveling on the north side of Cuba on the Tropic of Cancer. According to wikipedia, the 22 degree reference refers to the circle around the sun -- the circle has a radius of approximately 22° but I find it amazing that we saw it at this exact location - 22 degrees latitude.
He also told us that it is caused by light through ice crystals and is seen, based solely on the weather and atmospheric conditions. It is only seen about 100 days of the year which means we had less than a one in three chance of actually seeing it. How blessed we were to be out at the right time and our ship being in precisely the right place.
He also told us that it is caused by light through ice crystals and is seen, based solely on the weather and atmospheric conditions. It is only seen about 100 days of the year which means we had less than a one in three chance of actually seeing it. How blessed we were to be out at the right time and our ship being in precisely the right place.
I have to
say that this was truly one of the most wondrous things I’ve seen on the World
Cruise. The only words I used yesterday
to describe it were “spectacular,” “phenomenal,” “spiritual,” “awesome,”
“God-like” and “incredible.”
This morning,
I woke up thinking about it and can now say that I’ve looked into the eye of
God. That’s how I feel.
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