Does a halo or “ring around the moon” really mean it is going to rain soon?
Mike
There’s never any guarantee that it will or won’t rain. The halo, though, indicates that there’s a lot of moisture in the air – it’s composed of tiny ice crystals in the atmosphere.
–Da Cap’n
“Playin’ solitaire 'til dawn
With a deck of fifty-one.”
The same phenomenon can also cause a ring around the sun, which appears as a black ring. It is less often seen, and rather ominous if you ever see a dark vivid one.
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It means they didn’t use SHout ,“ring around the moon” 
Capn is right. also the high altitude, whispy cloud formations are ice crystal clouds and if you see them there may be a chance for rain in the next day or so. No guantees of course. but there is some meterological basis to it from what I understand.
what I found says that the ice crystal clouds come before a warm front, sometimes causing long easy rains
look at number 8… bout mid page in the link
http://athena.wednet.edu/curric/weather/hsweathr/solutions.html#halo
I always was told it meant Snow…
Thanks to all who have replied to my ring around the moon question…it just so happens that I saw the ring about two days before it rained here and during a wam front so the replies were mostly dead on.
mike r
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Sometime in summer 1990, in Manhattan Beach, CA, around noon, I saw a circular rainbow around the sun!!
The next year, on June 10, 1991, coming back from Las Vegas on a Greyhound bus, I was about 2 hours east of Barstow when I saw a rainbow “ribbon” radiating out from the sun, purple at one end, red at the other, like a long colorful scarf around someone’s neck. I even photographed it.
We in the midwest (at least me) saw a ring around the moon last night. It was beautiful. I took pictures and video but I don’t know if the pics came out good or not.