No, sorry, not of the coming of the Lord. Earlier today, while flying over the East Coast, mine eyes have seen the Glory, a lovely but elusive optical phenomenon.

I know what it is because of an old Scientific American article I’d read as a kid, which discussed meteorological optical phenomena, mainly rainbows of all kinds. The Glory was perhaps the strangest of the lot, and it stuck in my tender future-physicist mind.

As you can see in the rather poor photo I managed on my Nokia, a Glory is a circular rainbow that forms on a cloud of water droplets around the shadow of an object – such as an airplane – standing between it and the sun. The sun was shining from the other side of the plane (these days, when you can reserve your seats online, I make sure to have a window away from the sun, so I can see the planet’s surface without the dazzle of direct sunlight) and though our shadow was barely visible, the colorful halo of diffracted light around it was plainly there, delighting us as it flew alongside us for more than an hour.

Hallelujah!