Unusual rainbows as auroral candidates: another point of view [SSA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1705.06773


Several auroral events that occurred in the past have not been catalogued as such due to fact that they were described in the historical sources with different terminology. Hayakawa et al. (2016) have reviewed historical oriental chronicles and have proposed the terms “unusual rainbow” and “white rainbow” as candidates to auroras. In this work, we present three events that took place in the 18th century in two different settings (the Iberian Peninsula and Brazil) that were originally described with similar definition/wording used by the oriental chronicles, despite the inherent differences in terms associated to oriental and Latin languages. We show that these terms are indeed applicable to the three case studies from Europe and South America. Thus, the auroral catalogues available can be extended for occidental sources with this new terminology.

Read this paper on arXiv…

V. Carrasco, R. Trigo and J. Vaquero
Mon, 22 May 17
10/51

Comments: 6 pages, accepted for publication in Publ. Astron. Soc. Jpn