One of the sky's rarest phenomena is back: How to see rare night-shining clouds this summer

Rare noctilucent clouds shine above the city of Kennewick in Washington State June 2. (Image credit: John Clement.) Noctilucent cloud season has officially begun! One of the earliest sightings was captured by photographer John Clement , glowing in the skies over the city of Kennewick, Washington, on June 2, who had set out to capture a striking conjunction of Venus and Jupiter, which had occurred earlier that evening. "As Twilight deepened I began to notice the possible noctilucents starting to become visible over Badger Mtn. as we call it, A popular hiking hill about a mile from my house," Clement told Space.com in an email. "So at 9:58 I turned my camera towards Badger and took the first set of images and it confirmed they were noctilucent." The three-shot panorama was captured using an Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark III camera coupled with a 150 mm lens set to capture a series of bracketed 1-second exposures as the clouds shone in the skies above Clement's patio in southwest Kennewick. Astronomy enthusiast Daniel Fischer also posted a view of noctilucent clouds to the social media site X, showing the rare cloud formation shining above the town of Flensburg in a livestream on May 31. What are noctilucent clouds? Noctilucent clouds coalesce from tiny ice water crystals that accumulate in the mesosphere 50 miles (80 kilometres) above Earth's surface — roughly 10 times the height of ordinary cirrus and cloud formations. …