Montana Outdoors

January 12, 2007

2º Rainbow

Filed under: Montana, Nature, Outdoors, Photos, Pictures — montucky @ 11:08 pm

This morning at sun rise, the temperature was already twice the night’s low of 1º and heating up fast. It should reach the double-digits by this afternoon.

Here in Western Montana we are blessed with rapid weather changes and temperature swings. Three days ago the high temperature was a record-breaking 52º and last night we had practically no temperature at all. Besides amusing the residents around here, this quirk of Fahrenheit set up the conditions for something I have never seen before.

Because of the recent mild weather the water in the river is warmer than usual for this time of year, and when the air temperature dropped last night it caused columns of steam to rise from the water, more than what is normal. When the rays of the rising sun encountered one of the steam columns, it created a rainbow; a 2º rainbow. It can be faintly seen roughly in the center of this picture (taking a photo into the sun isn‘t all that easy).

2º Rainbow

This is what the steam columns look like not looking into the sun:

Steam columns

Now, while I’m wasting too many megabytes of server space anyway, it’s probably a good time to share my sympathy for a friend who owns this ranch and has to look at this scene every day:

Ranch

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