Contrails are a type of ice cloud produced when water vapor generated from the airplane’s engines condenses and freezes around dust particles or with the water vapor already present in the air.
Rainbow contrails are produced when the frozen water droplets diffract sunlight in the same direction.
Mukherjee told Space.com, which originally published the photographs, that he “couldn’t believe” the he was able to capture the rare sight and added “nature never disappoints”. The report said Mukherjee had originally set out to photograph the International Space Station transiting the sun, but clouds soon put a stop to that.
He then turned his sights to an emerging sundog — a concentrated patch of sunlight occasionally seen to the right, left, or both sides of the sun — with a low-magnification zoom when he saw an airplane in the field of view.
He said the colors were faint and not completely visible to the naked eye at the time, and that if he hadn’t zoomed his camera, he probably would have missed it completely.