Sugary
You see them when you are above the level of the top of the clouds - or very occasionally when you are in a very thin cloud. The shadow in the photos is the photographers, cast onto the cloud, and the rings are caused by defraction of water droplets. For some reason I've never really understood, each person can only see their own spectre and not that of their companions.
I didn't see one for years and then I had a run of them a few years back - on Arran, Scafell Pike, and Buachaille Etive Mor, and in the French Pyrenees too. I've never managed to get the rainbow to come out as clear in a photo as it appears in reality - I think to get a classic shot a polarizing filter would really help. If in thin cloud you sometimes see the spectre and shadow cast fleetingly in front of you in the air, rather than looking down on it - which is very eerie - this happened to me on Scafell Pike.
A related phenomenon seen less often is a White rainbow or a Fogbow, which is the same but has a pure white halo instead of a rainbow-like one - which you see depends on the size of the water droplets, with a fogbow requiring almost microscopic sized droplets of water. I saw one of these on
Sgurr nan Ceathreamhnan:
and last month Helen photographed one on little
Ben Bhraggie near Brora:
- Fogbow on Ben Bhraggie
Canisp photographed both a fogbow and a Brocken Spectre in his report on
Carn Chuinneag...
Whichever you see, they are pretty special
- one reason to head up a hill through the mist!