Brilliant fog bows spotted along Puget Sound-area waters

A rather gorgeous and surreal sight was to be had by those hiking up around Deception Pass State Park last weekend.

Kim Knight Wilkinson spotted a brilliant fog bow looming just over the water.

Fog bows are generally seen as an arc of dense fog along the edge of a fog patch. The physics is somewhat similar to traditional rainbows in that the bow is caused by sunlight refracting inside water droplets.

However, unlike rainbows, where the raindrops are large enough to refract sunlight into its individual colors, the water droplets in a fog bow are much smaller, and so the refractions aren't as precise.

Thus, the way the light scatters from a fog bow, you get a lot of color overlapping, and more of a hazy white bow instead of the colorful rainbow.

But the fog wasn't just relegated to the Admiralty Inlet area. Roberta Johnson also spotted a fog bog in the waters along Hood Canal:

Thanks for sharing!