Wendy Lisa Katz, age 10,
What makes a lunar halo?
Seen from space, our world wears a fuzzy halo caused by molecules of air dancing in the sunlight But the moon, we are told, has no air It is surrounded by empty space on all sides The lunar halo we see around the moon, then does not belong to it The pale, glimmering circle of light is caused by particles in the atmosphere above our heads Up here in the cold, the air often teems with tiny fragments of ice and frozen vapor They make a filmy trap for the moonbeams and scatter their light around to form a pale, glimmering circle, and often another circle outside it