during the total eclipse today, I witnessed a ring of light in the atmosphere (NOT the ring around the moon, totally separate, present for just a few seconds) – what is that and what makes it happen?

Question

It was so cool.

In: Planetary Science

Answer 1

There’s a number of different things that can cause this. Hopefully this wikipedia article helps:

http://wikipedia.org/wiki/46°_halo

EDIT: more general article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_(optical_phenomenon)