Something quite heavenly was observed in the sky on Tuesday night. Christopher Green wrote to say: “There was a very strange moon last night, it had a big concentric circle around it.” Photographs taken in Hertfordshire and East Sussex and posted on the BBC Weather Watchers website showed a gigantic ring around the moon. See bit.ly/2ktGT2U. These showed a wide ring of faint white light circling the moon, with a slight tinge of red on the inside edge of the ring.
Or as Percy Shelley described in his sublime poem The Cloud:
“I bind the Sun’s throne with a burning zone,
And the Moon’s with a girdle of pearl”
This was a lunar halo, created by moonlight and ice crystals. The moonlight needs to