Earth from space: Warped 'double rainbow' glory appears next to rare cloud swirls over Mexican island

This 2012 satellite photo shows a unique perspective of a rare, rainbow-like phenomenon, known as a glory, that appeared next to a Mexican island just as the landmass spawned a separate series of equally uncommon cloud vortices.

Glories are multicolor light shows similar to rainbows, with one key difference: While rainbows form via a combination of reflection and refraction when sunlight bounces off falling rain droplets and splits into different wavelengths, glories are created by backward diffraction — when light bounces directly off even smaller water droplets in clouds or mist, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. Because of this, glories only appear exactly opposite the sun, known as the anti-solar point.

This glory appeared adjacent to Guadalupe Island in the Pacific Ocean, around 150 miles (240 km) off the western coast of Mexico, and seemed to stretch for more than 300 miles (480 kilometers). Although there appear to be two distinct glories running parallel to one another, it is a single entity.

In the image, a line of eerily perfect cloud swirls, known as Von Kármán vortices, trail off the island's southernmost point. These swirling structures are formed when clouds get caught up in an airflow that has been disrupted by a tall landmass, most often above an ocean. In this case, the disruption is caused by a volcanic mountain ridge in the north of Guadalupe Island, which rises more than 4,200 feet (1,300 meters) above sea level.

While the glory and vortices are both only visible because of the thick stratocumulus clouds covering this part of the Pacific, their appearances are not connected to one another.

Related: See all the best images of Earth from space

Normally, glories appear as concentric multicolor circles when viewed from the ground or in the air because the diffracted light radiates outward as it bounces back toward the observer. Even from space, the rainbow-like phenomena often look circular, as was the case when NASA's Columbia space shuttle viewed the first glory from orbit in 2003.