Interested in weather, meteorology and photography. Aviation weather observer.
Other account: @Deme@sopuli.xyz
They sure don’t tend to do that, but there are still mundane explanations for this. An unintentional collision between the satellite and another object being one of them.
“I find it hard to believe they would use such a big satellite as an ASAT target,” McDowell said.
Not because of Kessler syndrome, just your run of the mill space debris reentering the atmosphere and increasing the amounts of certain metals up there that contribute to ozone depletion. In other words, that may well happen even if we’re lucky and avoid Kessler syndrome.
Hey guys, Peter Griffin here to explain the joke the image.
The image taken in Yunnan (China) 16 Aug 2022 by JiaQi Sun displays a Cumulonimbus calvus with the accessory cloud pileus on top. A pileus is formed when a rising cloud pushes the air above it higher which causes it to cool down adiabatically. When sufficient humidity is present in that higher layer of air, the humidity condenses into a pileus.
Here the pileus displays quite magnificent iridescence. The sun is behind the cloud. When sunlight passes through the very small and evenly sized cloud droplets of the pileus, diffraction takes place. Different wavelengths are diffracted in different angles and thus the white light of the sun is broken down into separate colours. While the cloud droplets are similar in size, there is still some variation there. The size of the droplets also affects the ammount of diffraction and thus the colours are somewhat disordered.
If you want to see cloud iridescence yourself, look for clouds passing in front of the sun that aren’t opaque enough to block it completely. Lenticular clouds, Cirrocumulus lenticularis in particluar are good candidates for iridescence as they are formed in a similar manner to the pileus here and have an even distribution in droplet size.
There have been a number of viral photoshops circulating the internet since the original pictures were taken where the cloud has been added to wide angle shots and made to appear like it takes up half the sky. These however are easily debunked with basic knowledge about clouds and the optical phenomena in question as the colours here are impossible at wider angles.
Thanks! Yes, it is a photo. The moth was chilling on a window after sunset. The blue dots are out of focus apron lights.