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profdant139's avatar
profdant139
Explorer II
Nov 19, 2015

Question for you snow experts: are rainbow sparkles common?

We just got back from a week of snow camping in the Sequoias, and we came across something we'd never seen before in 50 years of snow sports -- snow that sparkled in all the colors of the rainbow. He...
sue_t's avatar
sue_t
Explorer
Nov 20, 2015
Some explanations:
The colored lights are sparkles of sunlight reflected and refracted internally inside snow crystals. Like a prism or a rainbow, the hexagonal crystals break the light into component wavelengths, giving the observer a variety of colors sampled from the rainbow: red, magenta, yellow, cyan, blue, and violet.

http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.ca/2014/01/chromatic-snow-sparkles.html

http://whyfiles.org/2010/why-does-snow-sometimes-sparkle/

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~zhuxj/astro/html/snowsparkle.html

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