THE NIGHT SKY STARTED SPILLING COLOR

 THE NIGHT SKY STARTED SPILLING COLOR

At first it looks like regular clouds… then the whole ceiling turns into a stained-glass glow—greens, reds, and electric blues moving across the darkness while the birds slice through it like silhouettes.

This kind of rainbow “oil-slick” color can happen when tiny water droplets or ice crystals in thin clouds spread and bend moonlight (or nearby city light) into different wavelengths. When the droplets are very small and all about the same size, light waves interfere with each other and create those patchy, shimmering bands—a phenomenon called cloud iridescence. Sometimes it shows up near the Moon as a lunar corona (a colored ring close to the Moon), but it can also appear as scattered color across the cloud layer depending on how the cloud is shaped and how the light hits it.

Night clouds + micro-droplets + diffraction = sky stained glass .