22° Davebow Moon Halo

I'd never before heard of a moon rainbow - a moonbow (also lunar rainbow, lunar bow, or white rainbow). I have now, but I still have never seen one. Turns out this isn't a moonbow - a moonbow is the same shape as a rainbow & always appears on the opposite side of the sky from the moon. Scratch that.

 

Then I discovered a phenomenon called a 22° halo, which - among other things - forms a colored halo 22° around the sun or moon. Bingo! Except upon performing a google image search for moon halo, nothing of this sort comes up. Apparently a moon halo is much larger than seen here & almost completely white.

 

Now I'm slightly leaning toward either a moon ring (which by all accounts seems to be exactly the same thing as a 22° moon halo) or some other phenomenon that never before has been witnessed, despite the thousands of years humans have been gazing upwards. I'm thinking the latter is probably it.

 

I'm gonna called it The 22° Davebow Moon Halo. I like the way it rolls off my tongue. Try it. It's fun to say. I promise.

 

A quick note on post-processing: while I did do a little to cut down the glare & help bring out the colors a bit, the final product not only is quite close to the original photo, it actually is closer to how it looked the night I took this, as the camera sadly wasn't able to capture it perfectly. It really was quite amazing to see.

 

UPDATE:

Thanks to one of my brilliant friends I now know this particular optical phenomenon is called a lunar corona. Beautiful!

Done