Thousands watch as sun wears red-and-blue ring

Thousands of people of Dinajpur and adjacent districts witnessed the rare sight of a red-and-blue ring around the sun yesterday morning.

After the phenomenon became visible, many people went outside and gazed at the sky to view the rare sight that continued from 10:30am to 1:30pm, witnesses said.

“It was more beautiful than anything I could have imagined. I told my colleagues and relatives to have a look at the sky,” said Shusmita Roy, a viewer in Dinajpur.

Many people got scared as the scene, quite unusual to them, appeared on the sky.

“The ring, caused by the refraction of the sun’s rays through ice crystals in the atmosphere, is a natural phenomenon. It is more common around the moon,” FR Sarker, general secretary of Bangladesh Astronomical Society, said.

“This atmospheric phenomenon is caused when the sun’s rays get deflected through hexagonal ice crystals present in cirrus clouds, Cirrus clouds, visible as stray wisps in the sky, are formed when water vapour freezes into ice crystals at altitudes of five to 10 km from the earth’s surface,” he said.

It is called 22-degree circular halo of the sun, because the ring is located 22 degrees away from the sun itself. Both the sun and moon block a ½ degree region of the sky at a time and the ring around the sun is about 44 times larger than sun itself.

The 22-degree halo was last observed in West Bengal on July 6 this year and in September 2008 in Siliguri.

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