Published in Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc. 98 485-494 in 2017
G. P. Können
Rainbows, halos, coronas, and glories are aesthetic features admired over
millennia by man. They are also carriers of useful information about the
physical properties of drops and solid particles floating in the atmospheres of
Earth and other planets. Although atmospheric optics is a centuries-old
discipline, significant progress in the understanding of these phenomena has
been achieved during the past 40 years, as well as of their relation to the
physical properties of the individual scatterers. At the same time, with the
development of planetary exploration, the number of observations of rainbows,
halos, and glories in the atmospheres of planets other than Earth is steadily growing.
In this article we describe these phenomena and their information content and
illustrate them with pictures mostly showing their typical appearance rather
than presenting the “best pictures ever.”