A very special, and colourful, selection of pictures this week as nacreous clouds were spotted across the UK on Thursday!

These magical, luminous clouds are known under a few different names, including 'mother-of-pearl', polar stratospheric clouds, or nacreous.

They occur during the polar winter generally at high northerly latitudes, when temperatures are very low, lower than -78C, so are rarely spotted in the UK and Ireland.

At these temperatures, rays of light from the sun are refracted through the ice crystals in the stratosphere, known as cloud iridescence, and causes the shimmering rainbow to form over the cloud. The higher the sun on the horizon, the more colours are seen.