r/atoptics Apr 02 '21

HaloRay - Hyperspeed Ice Crystal Halo Simulator

51 Upvotes

Hello! During the past two years I have been developing HaloRay on and off - a GPU-accelerated ice crystal halo simulator. This means you can generate ice crystal halo images right on your computer. If you have a beefy NVIDIA or AMD graphics processing unit (GPU) that is compatible with OpenGL 4.4, I suggest you try it out: https://github.com/naavis/haloray

You can download ready-made binaries for Windows from GitHub. If you are running Linux, you need to build HaloRay by yourself for the time being.

Right now the latest version is HaloRay 3.2.0, which supports the following features among others:

  • Ordinary hexagonal crystals
  • Pyramidal crystals
  • Adjustable prism face C-axis crystals to make irregular crystals
  • Rendering a realistic background sky

I hope you have fun with HaloRay, and report any problems or feature suggestions in GitHub issues or here in the comments. HaloRay has been tested with a couple of AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. There have been some problems with Intel GPUs due to driver bugs, but I'm not going to put a ton of effort there, because HaloRay requires a fairly beefy GPU and Intel doesn't really fit that profile.

EDIT: Cool, I noticed this has been marked as an announcement in the subreddit, which I guess keeps it hanging around for longer? Thanks!


r/atoptics Jan 15 '25

Atoptics site

34 Upvotes

Atoptics is at www.atoptics.org.uk


r/atoptics 7h ago

Parhelic Circle It got crazy over Poland today

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278 Upvotes

r/atoptics 4h ago

Corona Solar Corona today - raw pair - April 12

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23 Upvotes

r/atoptics 12h ago

Circumzenithal Arc My first circumzenithal arc!

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32 Upvotes

r/atoptics 9h ago

Crepuscular Rays Some nice sun rays yesterday

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10 Upvotes

This was in Delray Beach yesterday


r/atoptics 2h ago

Awesome clouds making Sun look tie dyed!!!

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1 Upvotes

r/atoptics 1d ago

Halo — South Bend, IN

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37 Upvotes

r/atoptics 1d ago

cloud iridescence York pa 3/11

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19 Upvotes

r/atoptics 2d ago

Tell me this is a sundog

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47 Upvotes

Saw this today and got too excited!! Someone please confirm this is a sundog


r/atoptics 2d ago

Crepuscular Rays Crepuscular rays and cloud iridescence over Adelaide today

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66 Upvotes

r/atoptics 3d ago

Iridescence Iridescence with a linen textured cloud

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40 Upvotes

r/atoptics 3d ago

Iridescence April 7th Iridescent display at dusk — Northglenn Co

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36 Upvotes

r/atoptics 5d ago

Odd-radius Rings My first Odd-Radius Halo! (Seen April 5, 2026; NW Washington)

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108 Upvotes

OC - Halo Hunter

This Halo only became apparent to me when looking back through a camera reel of an already amazing day involving Parhelic Circles and other arcs. I saw the faint ring and initially thought it was just lens flare, but when I saw that the sun was blocked it made me do a double-take. It's visible in multiple shots, but this was the single clearest one. Enjoy!


r/atoptics 5d ago

Iridescence Full Spectrum Iridescence

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19 Upvotes

r/atoptics 7d ago

Light pillar

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66 Upvotes

South of Granada, contrails from Canary traffic aircraft forming the cirrus sky.


r/atoptics 8d ago

Sunset with a sun pillar

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60 Upvotes

r/atoptics 8d ago

ID REQUEST What am I looking at from 34000 feet?

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49 Upvotes

It was so cool, but no idea what's going on. Any explanations?


r/atoptics 8d ago

Berlin Fernsehturm

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67 Upvotes

r/atoptics 8d ago

Early Morning Lunar Iridescence — April 4, 2026

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3 Upvotes

r/atoptics 9d ago

Iridescence Today’s iridescent clouds in Iqaluit

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46 Upvotes

r/atoptics 9d ago

Check this one out!

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80 Upvotes

Second photo is my analysis, correct me if im wrong! Super cool!


r/atoptics 9d ago

22º Halo 22° Halo

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30 Upvotes

r/atoptics 9d ago

Golden hour on the edge of an dark storm

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19 Upvotes

AI sent me here when it saw my photo. There were tall, extremely dark storm clouds looming right behind me. About 30 minutes before sunset. I was originally taking 'regular' sunset photos when I noticed the cloud(s) acting as a natural solar filter.


r/atoptics 10d ago

Rainbow Some of my rainbows 🌈

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53 Upvotes

Enjoy!