Thursday, 12 October 2006

Circular Lowitz arc in Germany


At the end of September weather fronts from an ex-hurricane reached Germany. In the leading cirrus, Lowitz arcs were observed over two days. Hartmut Bretschneider in Schneeberg (Saxony) made the first sighting on 28th September. He first saw a parhelion with a Lowitz arc emanating from the parhelion when the sun was at an elevation of 14 deg. Later when the sun was higher there was a very bright Parry arc and an upper Lowitz arc (right photo). On evening of the following day Werner Krell saw a solitary upper Lowitz arc at Wersau (Hessen). His photo was taken at a sun elevation of 11 deg. [2, 3]
 
by Claudia Hinz

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4 comments:

  1. Jukka Ruoskanen12 October 2006 at 21:08

    Whoa! Great stuff indeed.

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  2. Marko Riikonen12 October 2006 at 21:52

    Circumzenith arc is extraordinary, even with usm. In the Werner Keller photo no 3 there seems to be strong upper component in the "normal" place, just above the parhlion, looking as a patch of 22 halo. But I don't see upper Lowitz in the Hartmut Bretschneider higher sun photo. Is something missing, there is only one photo, but you mention about some "right photo"?

    Folks should start stacking in Germany. I'd like to how these kind of Lowitz displays turn out with several minutes stacking sequences.

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  3. Michael Ellestad14 October 2006 at 02:52

    Claudia I got a similar display back in 2004 and all three lowitz atc were well-formed. The circular and lower arc were quite striking.

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  4. Claudia Hinz14 October 2006 at 14:20

    @marko
    I've got from Hartmut only the edited picture, but it would be better to unsharp mask the original.

    Here is a bigger size of picture with unsharp picture. The arrow show the upper Lowitz arc. He have seen it also with naked eyes.

    Best wishes
    Claudia

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