Earthviews: Ohio Lunar Halo, from September

John Chumack, East Dayton, Ohio, September 30, 2012 [USRA].

Among the great pile of neglected posts set aside as we busied ourselves with a project requiring all our attention in recent weeks was an Earth Science Picture of the Day (EPOD) capturing the glory of our large natural satellite two days after September's Harvest Moon in the skies southeast of East Dayton, Ohio. 

The original (linked to the thumbnail at left) carries either the dusk's or the cities city's sodium vapor street lights, a combination of factors adding red to the thin, relatively high-altitude ice crystals along a southeast line of sight.

We reproduced the image here, cropped and in black and white, in hope of illustrating the wispy contacts and secondary refractions more easily seen by naked eye.

Photographer John Chumack wrote, "Because Mother Nature is sometimes surprising, I always go out at look at the night sky before I go to bed, even if the forecast calls for cloudy skies."