Monthly Archives: May 2015

Travel destination

Chomphet Hike, Luang Prabang, Laos

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The Chomphet Hike is nice hike across the river from Luang Prabang, Laos. I used this wonderful map for the hike. My hike probably was about 8 km and I went in a circle around the whole hike on the map. The hike would be very difficult (next to impossible) to follow in several places if you didn’t have the map.

Vat Nong Sakeo, on pond (covered in plants - so it is green)

Vat Nong Sakeo on a pond.

Ladder over the fence

Much of the hike is through rice fields. I like this ladder over the fence (to keep out goats and other animals I imagine. This part of the trail was a bit difficult for me to follow on the map, I wasn’t at all sure I took the right path but I got where I need to eventually.

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travel

Circumhorizontal Arc (Fire Rainbow) in Hoi An, Vietnam

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I saw my first Circumhorizontal Arcs (Fire Rainbows) display in Johor Bahru, Malaysia. A couple days ago I experienced them again in Hoi An, Vietnam.

photo of palm trees and fire rainbow

The scene looked much more spectacular than this.

All I had with me at the time, was my iPad mini and this is the best photo I could get. Zooming in on the fire rainbow provided very poor photos. The iPad mini and iPhone (and other smart phones) have remarkably good cameras for many shots. But for a few types of shots they are very poor. Getting a good shot of this rainbow was one such case.

I biked home and got my Canon PowerShot SX60 HS and took this photo.

close up of a fire rainbow

Close up of circumhorizontal arc (fire rainbow) in Hoi An, Vietnam with Canon

I had actually posted about the phenomenon of circumhorizontal arcs on my science blog in 2006 before I had seen them for myself.

A circumhorizontal arc (also known by the exciting name, fire rainbow) is an optical phenomenon – an ice-halo formed by plate-shaped ice crystals in high level cirrus clouds. If the cloud is at the right angle to the sun, the crystals will refract the sunlight just as when rainbow is created.

Fire rainbows can only occur when the sun is 58 degrees or higher above the horizon and when the clouds or haze contain plate-shaped ice crystals. The arc has a considerable angular extent and thus, rarely is complete. When only fragments of a cirrus cloud are in the appropriate sky and sun position, they may appear to shine with spectral colors.

Related: Curious Cat nature photos – Magical Day at Glacier-Waterton International Peace Park (USA and Canada), which also ended with a rainbow – Water Buffaloes in a field in Cambodia – Photos of clouds

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