# Lunar Eclipse and the 22 Degree Halo

The beautiful thing about atmospheric optics is that (almost) everyone can look up at the sky and see stunning optical phenomena from the sun, moon or some other celestial object. In this post I’ll focus on two particularly striking phenomena where the physical essence can be captured with relatively simple explanations.

The 22 degree halo is a ring around the sun or moon, which is often observed on cold days. Here are a couple images of the 22 degree halo around the sun and moon respectively:

22 degree halo around the sun

22 degree halo around the moon

Note that the 22 degree halo is distinct from the coronae, which occur due to different reasons. While the coronae arise due to the presence of water droplets, the 22 degree halo arises specifically due to the presence of hexagonal ice crystals in the earth’s atmosphere. So why 22 degrees? Well, it turns out that one can answer the question using rather simple undergraduate-level physics. One of the most famous questions in undergraduate optics is that of light refraction through a prism, illustrated below:

Fig. 1: The Snell’s Law Prism Problem

But if there were hexagonal ice crystals in the atmosphere, the problem is exactly the same, as one can see below. This is so because a hexagon is just an equilateral triangle with its ends chopped off. So as long as the light enters and exits on two sides of the hexagon that are spaced one side apart, the analysis is the same as for the triangle.

Equilateral triangle with ends chopped off, making a hexagon

It turns out that $\theta_4$ in Fig. 1 can be solved as a function of $\theta_1$ with Snell’s law and some simple trigonometry to yield (under the assumption that $n_1 =1$):

$\theta_4 = \textrm{sin}^{-1}(n_2 \times \textrm{sin}(60-\textrm{sin}^{-1}(\textrm{sin}(\theta_1)/n_2)))$

It is then pretty straightforward to obtain $\delta$, the difference in angle between the incident and refracted beam as a function of $\theta_1$. I have plotted this below for the index of refraction of ice crystals for three different colors of light, red, green and blue ($n_2 =$ 1.306, 1.311 and 1.317 respectively):

The important thing to note in the plot above is that there is a minimum angle below which there is no refracted beam, and this angle is precisely 21.54, 21.92 and 22.37 degrees for red, green and blue light respectively. Because there is no refracted beam below 22 degrees, this region appears darker, and then there is a sudden appearance of the refracted beam at the angles listed above. This is what gives rise to the 22 degree halo and also to the reddish hue on the inside rim of the halo.

Another rather spectacular celestial occurrence is the lunar eclipse, where the earth completely obscures the moon from direct sunlight. This is the geometry for the lunar eclipse:

Geometry of the lunar eclipse

The question I wanted to address is the reddish hue of the moon, despite it lying in the earth’s shadow. It would naively seem like the moon should not be observable at all. However, there is a similar effect occurring here as with the halo. In this case, the earth’s atmosphere is the refracting medium. So just as light incident on the prism was going upward and then exited going downward, the sun’s rays similarly enter the atmosphere on a trajectory that would miss the moon, but then are bent towards the moon after interacting with the earth’s atmosphere.

But why red? Well, this has the same origins as the reddish hue of the sunset. Because light scatters from atmospheric particles as $1/\lambda^4$, blue light gets scattered away much more easily than red light. Hence, the only color of light left by the time the light reaches the moon is primarily of red color.

It is interesting to imagine what the earth looks like from the moon during a lunar eclipse — it likely looks completely dark apart from a spectacular red halo around the earth. Anyway, one should realize that Snell’s law was first formulated in 984 by Arab scientist Ibn Sahl, and so it was possible to come to these conclusions more than a thousand years ago. Nothing new here!