A bright circle around the moon was observed in Gulbene – Gulbene district – Dzirkstele.lv

On the evening of April 18, around 10:30 p.m., “Dzirkstele” managed to capture the halo of the moon, which could be observed in Gulbene.

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In “Wikipedia” we read that a halo is a shining ring around a celestial body, an optical effect. Halos usually appear around the sun and moon, in rare cases around street lights. Halos are caused by the refraction of light by ice crystals in cirrus clouds 5 to 10 kilometers high, in the upper layers of the troposphere. Sometimes on a large island the halo is formed by ice crystals very close to the Earth’s surface. In this case, it looks like shiny gems. Unlike a rainbow, which occurs opposite the sun as light refracts from water droplets, a halo occurs around the sun or moon as light refracts from ice particles.

Meteorologist and weather news editor of Latvian Television Toms Bricis explains that the bright circle around the moon is the moon’s halo, or popularly called the “moon garden”. Beliefs say that the “moon garden” warns of an approaching blizzard or bad weather the next day, but this is not always the case. The optical phenomenon occurs when a bright moon is obscured by a thin but transparent layer of cirrus clouds in which tiny ice crystals refract the moonlight, creating a circle of light.