Passenger Captures Mesmerizing ‘Pilot’s Glory’ Phenomenon in the Sky

A video of a unique optical phenomenon known as a “glory” spotted from a plane has gone viral on TikTok.
Heather Reedy, a 37-year-old registered nurse based in Virginia, spotted the mesmerizing sight as the plane made its descent to the Dominican Republic, she told Newsweek. She shared a video of the sighting from her TikTok account @little_birdie21, which has amassed over 383,000 views since it was posted on August 9.
A message overlaid on the video reads: “POV [point of view]: You witness the optical phenomenon ‘Pilot’s Glory’ on the flight to your honeymoon.”
The footage shows a view through a plane’s window, where the aircraft’s shadow is seen against clouds, with what appears to be a halo around it.
A glory is “a colorful, circular optical phenomenon caused by water droplets scattering light,” according to a July 2018 blog post on the NASA Earth Observatory website.
Reedy didn’t realize that the phenomenon was captured in her clip until watching the video a couple of months after it was first taken in February.
She said: “I noticed that the halo looked interesting, so I researched and found out that it isn’t as common as we would think.”
A “glory” is a colorful optical phenomenon featuring a bright red outer ring and a blue ring toward the center that “forms when water droplets scatter sunlight back toward a source of light,” according to the NASA Earth Observatory website.
“If you have ever seen a series of concentric rings of color near a mist or fog, you have likely seen a glory,” NASA notes.
Glories have been marveled at for centuries, and mountain climbers often saw the phenomenon. Among the first scientific reports of a glory was during a French-led expedition to the equator in the 1730s, when the scientist Pierre Bouguer reported seeing “a cloud that covered us, dissolved itself, and let through the rays of the rising Sun…Then each of us saw his shadow projected upon the cloud,” while climbing Mount Pambamarca in the Andes, according to the NASA Earth Observatory.
“What seemed most remarkable to us was the appearance of a halo or glory around the head, consisting of three or four small concentric circles, very brightly colored, each of them with the same colors as the primary rainbow,” Bouguer’s report said.
During this era, foggy mountains, steaming geysers or hot springs offered the best chances of seeing glories. But with the birth of new technologies, people began to spot glories from other places, such as air balloons and airplanes in the 20th century, making glory sightings more commonplace, NASA notes.
“Today, pilots and passengers have a good chance of seeing them, earning the phenomenon the name ‘glory of the pilot’ or ‘pilot’s halo,'” the NASA Earth Observatory blog post says.
TikTok users were amazed by the sighting in the viral clip, such as @GwydionSilverhawk, who said, “I was skydiving and saw this as I fell through a cloud. I saw my shadow surrounded by a rainbow as I fell through, and I will never forget it!!”
“I’ve seen this three times in my life. Captured it twice,” said @abogado_toast.
“I saw this one of the first times I flew and I’ve never seen it again,” another TikToker, Laren, said.
Mimosia wrote, “Neat. I’ve seen many shadows of the planes I’m in. but that’s the 1st time I saw the halo on the shadow. nice capture.”
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