Talk:Light pillar

question

In the article, the sun pillar is attributed to ice crystals in the air, but I have seen this phenomenon when the temperature is well above freezing. Is this something different, or is the article wrong? 65.167.146.130 (talk) 20:11, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

Agreed, something's missing here. Two of the photos shown are from Arizona and SF, California (over the sea) - surely there's no way that either of these photos are showing light reflecting off ice?! 213.48.14.66 (talk) 10:25, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

I saw this the first time a few day agos while the eruption of the vulcano in Iceland. SkySilver (talk) 14:03, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

For those still wondering after all those years: ice crystal halos (which include light pillars) can form at any ground temperature, since the clouds responsible for them are high up in the atmosphere, where temperatures are permanently below freezing. Hence they always contain ice crystals, no matter the temperature on the ground. Drabkikker (talk) 15:39, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

Silly misnomers: "Aurora Verticalis", "Crystal beam phenomenon"

All right, since it appears to be taking a flight on the internet over the past few days, and before someone tries to add it to this Wikipedia page again, I'll repeat my earlier statement on the bogus term "Aurora Verticalis":

The source of the term "Aurora Verticalis" seems to be this article from two days ago, which appears to have made up the term on the spot, as shows from its complete prior absence on the web. That in itself (apart from mirror.co.uk not being a scholarly source) should be sufficient to discard the term, but in addition, it is plain confusing: "Aurora" is the scientific term reserved for the northern/southern lights; i.e., a physical phenomenon involving solar particles interacting with Earth's magnetic field, which has nothing to do with the virtual images created by light interacting with ice crystals, as is the case for light pillars. They belong to the family of ice crystal halos, not aurorae.

And while we're at it, I propose to get rid of the equally spurious "crystal beam phenomenon", which was somehow added last year. Awesome as the name may sound, it is found nowhere in the literature, and all websites that use it seem to have copied their information more or less literally from this Wikipedia page. Now that's what I call a self-propagating cycle of disinformation. Drabkikker (talk) 16:19, 30 January 2016 (UTC)

References

"Artificial" creates real confusion

One of the photos is labelled "Artificial light Pillars over North Bay Ontario, Canada". This is a source of confusion. I could mean A) real light pillars where the light is artificial rather than natural, like sun/moon, or it could mean B) something made to look like light pillars but really produced using different means than what would qualify as real light pillars. It could even mean C) real light pillars but artificial in that they were trying to create the effect rather than them just being observed incidentally. 172.75.76.157 (talk) 00:38, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

I agree it's confusing. I've adjusted the caption. Drabkikker (talk) 16:39, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

Inappropriate to discuss light pillars often being attributed to UFO sightings?

In Las Vegas, the UFO subreddit on reddit appears to be attributing terrestrial based light pillars to UFO sightings. After [1], it seems light pillars are the cause of the event. (Here is the overlaid projection on top the city)

Would it be inappropriate to mention that light pillars are sometimes the cause of UFO sightings? corylulu (talk) 06:18, 25 December 2022 (UTC)