Then up and spake an old Sailor,
Had sailed the Spanish Main,
**"I pray thee, put into yonder port,
for I fear a hurricane.
“Last night the moon had a golden ring,
And to-night no moon we see!”**
The skipper, he blew whiff from his pipe,
And a scornful laugh laughed he.
-from Wreck of the Hesperus, a truly awful poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Seen them around the moon dozens and dozens of times.
What’s far less common is to see the black ring around the sun at roughly the same apparent distance.
Nice picture. Usually you have to block the sun itself with some object in order not to get the picture totally washed out.
These moon rings are not uncommon at all. They’re more common with the moon 3/4ths or larger, which corresponds to the moon being well up while the sun is well down. So about 1 week every month has a good ring-making Moon. Provided you’re out there to look at it well after sunset or well before sunrise. If you don’t go outside & look at those times of day you’ll never see one.
The other factor is to have clear skies below, and very thin almost invisible cirrus clouds at altitude.
In the US midwest or south, the high thin cirrus is plenty common. Not as common as in the far North, but still plenty common. But the clear skies below are much more rare. Once a dull hazy day turns into a dull hazy night, the moon ring will probably not be visible at ground level even if it would be visible from an iarplane a mile or two up & above much of the haze.
I’ve lived in the US middle latitudes most of my life. I see several every year and have for decades.
We never call that a “black ring around the sun.”
We’ve always referred to it as a rainbow around the sun. Very, very cool.
~VOW
It’s the relative brightness of the rainbow around the sun, that makes the sky appear darker within it. It’s an optical illusion, the sky isn’t really any darker than it would be, if the rainbow were not there.
And remember:
A rainbow is God frowning at gay people.
-Stephen Colbert
Rain, usually, in these parts.
Well… I STILL don’t know how this happened (never having seen one before, I mean.) Personally, I think it was a sign. 
Of…
…
…
(haven’t thought of anything good yet)
…
?
Here’s what’s going on… but keep in mind, if you read any further, you will gain powers of knowledge that you’ll have to wield for the good of all (sorry in advance for the length, but we’re in GQ, may as well be comprehensive):
Between your eyes and the moon is our atmosphere. It’s a blanket of gasses (~78% nitrogen, ~21% oxygen, then a bit of argon, and other stuff) and particles like dust, water molecules, pollutants, volcanic ash, etc.
Despite appearing invisible over short distances in typical circumstances, it’s actually like living in a sheet of glass, and all that entails: the scattering of light, absorption and refraction, and a bunch of other stuff that makes the sky a very beautiful thing, depending on conditions.
Take a look at this diagram. As you can see, the air thins out the higher in altitude you go. This is because of gravity, and the density, pressure and temperature of the particular mix in our atmosphere. As you can see, we live in the Troposphere. This is the densest part of our atmosphere (making up about 80%), and where 99% of the water vapor lives. It’s only about 12 miles (~20 km) high.
As you climb higher and higher, the air gets less dense, temperature starts to drop (because our air acts as an insulator, retaining heat absorbed by the sun), the sky will darken, until you reach the Thermosphere, which is only about 60 or so miles up, about an hours drive in a car, which is where our atmosphere really starts to give way to the raw vacuum of space.
So, now you can see, there’s a gradient of all this “stuff” that’s about 100 miles thick. And you have to look through ~100 miles of this stuff to see anything in outer space, including the moon.
Which brings us back to the moon ring you saw. The moon is lit by very strong sunlight, and despite it’s brilliant, glowing white appearance, the surface of the moon is actually about the color of a chunk of coal. Imagine if the moon happened to be the color of limestone… Our nights under such a “white” full moon would probably appear as light out as pre-dawn.
Anyway, so, the moon is reflecting light, off the sun, becomes diffused (that is, scattered in all directions), and hits the atmosphere before it hits your eyes. Depending on the conditions of the atmosphere, this diffused and scattered light’s path may not be altered in any noticeable way, or, if there happens to be ice-crystals forming 15 miles up, it’s going to focus this scattered light into a halo, like a million prisms acting in unison.
So, like the sun, the moon (and even the stars, they seem to twinkle because of turbulence in the air) is subject to all sorts of common and rare phenomena like this. And just as the sun reddens during sunrise and sunset (because you’re looking through far much more atmosphere, as your gaze is cutting through horizontally, rather than straight up), so does the moon.
This is also why we have the Hubble Space Telescope. Being in space, we completely bypass all these atmospheric issues that can be very problematic when trying to resolve very accurate images of very distant objects (although, ground-based telescopes now employ some amazing technologies that get around some of these issues, such as using corrective techniques and software, nothing really beats bypassing our atmosphere altogether when it comes to observation).
You’re actually looking at the moon through a very thin layer of cirrus clouds. During the day, you may or may not notice them, as they’re very thin. Such a phenomenon is way more common than you think, but like many things, you may not notice it when it is occurring. People don’t really pay a lot of attention to the moon and/or its position in the sky.
As an aside, an activity that I have had my graduate science ed students do is to first predict where the moon will be at 9 pm a week from tonight, and what it will look like. Most people can’t begin to do that, although we’re all pretty good at predicting the sun’s position a week ahead of time. Then, they do a focused journal of observations for a couple months. Invariably, their subjective commentary relates to the fact that they never spent any appreciable time looking at the moon, thinking about it, etc., and how amazed they are at how much they have discovered for themselves. My point is that most people don’t notice the appearance of the moon even if they are aware that there’s a full moon, and it’s understandable that people would report that this is a “very strange phenomenon” etc.
Ignore cmyk. God is a woman, and she loves you, so she’s showing you her boob.
You’ve inspired me to change my world-view.
This evening I saw the whitish ring around the moon however it was a much tighter circle than any other moon ring I’ve seen. Instead of being 10 to 20 times bigger than the moon this one was merely two or three times the size. Is it a different phenomenon or were the ice crystals merely much higher up (if that would indeed be the cause)?
