That would be a 22° halo, a fairly uncommon atmospheric phenomenon where light refracts through hexagonal ice crystals in the atmosphere resulting in an average deviation from the angle it comes in at by around (funnily enough) 22°.
There are lots of other interesting atmospheric phenomena including sundogs, moonbows, and the much rarer 46° halo!
Though it sounds silly, sundogs are the name of an actual optic phenomena. They appear as bright spots on either side of the sun, aligned with where the halo may appear. Hence, they are “dogging” the sun.
Yeah that’s the one! Only seen it once (coinciding with a supermoon which was frankly surreal).
Coronas are a bit different I believe, though another one of the same group. I’ve always just called them their individual names, with coronas being tighter and more spectrally-distorting than halos. Maybe the only other collective name I’ve heard would be the minimally descriptive “atmospheric phenomenon” but that’s no fun at all.
Edit: Just took a brief look and indeed coronas are related but formed by refraction through water droplets rather than ice crystals! Cool to know!
Ice crystals. The old-fashioned name for it is a corona, and according to folk wisdom, a corona of that size is usually a harbinger of cold weather coming.
Where I live, cold almost always comes with some degree of wet, whereas wet doesn't always come with cold because we get the tail end of tropical cyclones.
You’re correct about halo phenomena being caused by ice crystals. As such, they are most often observed when there’s Cirrostratus in the sky, and that in turn is often the result of an incoming warm front. The Cirrostratus may start to thicken into Altostratus and Nimbostratus, so overcast and rainy would be the safest bet.
Don’t read any of the other explanations, they just spout off the same thing they want you to think!
I did my own research, it turns out this is due to ice crystals. The inside of the dome set on top of the flat earth is covered by LCD displays. These displays get cold in wintertime and ice crystals form within the displays. This causes all sorts of visual glitches, like these halos around the moon. When it warms back up the ice crystals go away and the moon looks normal again.
Don’t let people fool you with bullshit stories about ice crystals in the so called atmosphere. It’s a totally made up story, with just enough truth in it to make it believable.
If not the cloud cover or other atmospheric conditions, the lens of the camera the image was taken with. Was the halo visible to the naked eye or only in the photo?
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