Sunday 9 February 2014

The corona of the Moon

 
This photograph looks quite fuzzy but that's what I was after. It shows the Moon in the middle and the bright fuzzy patch around it. I've been meaning to look it up for a while now because I've noticed that it is always a restricted small area. It's called the corona of the Moon and is caused by the diffraction of light through water droplets. The suggestion is that different sized droplets can lead to different sizes of corona. This one was about 3 little fingers across so I'll remember to measure other ones. The effect called the halo of the Moon is due to refraction, which is a different bit of Physics.