At sunrise this morning the island was, as usual, cloaked in a thick fog. I decided to take the camera and go out for a bike. I have very few pictures of the fog. I find it incredibly tough to capture and everything usually just comes out looking like a grey mess.

But as I rode east on the dirt trails, it gradually changed from no sun, to a sun blocked just enough by the clouds that you could stare at it, to a bright morning sun that you had to look away from. This was when I reached Altar Rock. Stopping, and looking back to the west, back in to the fog, I noticed what I could only think to call a “fogbow.”

I did not realize that this is an actual phenomenon until I got home and found an entry in Wikipedia:

A fogbow is similar to a rainbow, but because of the very small size of water droplets that cause fog, smaller than 0.05 mm, the fog bow has no colors and appears white. Fogbows are sometimes called “white rainbows” or “cloudbows”. Mariners sometimes call them “sea-dogs.”

Unlike a Glory, which has multiple pale colored rings caused by diffraction, the fogbow is entirely white. The fogbow’s relative lack of colors are caused by the relatively smaller water drops… so small that the quantum mechanical wavelength of light becomes important and smears out colors that would be created by larger rainbow water drops.

In anticipation of Ackboater’s comment of “Photoshop” I will tell you that this photo was “doctored” a little bit in post-processing. I applied a Polarization filter which highlighted the blueness of the southern sky, creating a little more contrast with the foggy area.