Above the clouds: A bird, plane, or optical phenomenon?

Our Weather & Radar Meteorologist Tamsin captured this after take-off from London last week, have you ever spotted one of these before?

The optical phenomenon seen in the photograph above was taken from the window of a plane, having just taken off from London Luton.

What you can see is a type of 'glory'. Glories can be seen by air travellers as the shadow of the plane is cast on the clouds below, surrounded by a halo of light, though the shadow itself has nothing to do with the glory.

In order to see a glory, clouds, mist or fog need to be below you, in a straight line with the sun and the observer's eye. When sunlight shines through water droplets in clouds, forming the circular rainbow through diffraction.

Before air travel was common, glories were rare. The term 'Broken Spectre' is more commonly used because historically there were sightings of these glories from Brocken, in the Harz mountains of Northern Germany.

The elongated shadows of people are said to resemble a ghost or 'spectre', which is how the name came about. A Brocken Spectre is just simply a type of glory.

If you were to see this yourself on the top of a mountain, you would notice the rainbow halo surrounding only your own head, whilst others would only see it surrounding their own, and not yours!