The colours of a Martian sunrise, like this one spotted by NASA’s Perseverance rover, are the opposite of those on Earth. A low Sun appears blue on Mars instead of red, and the hue blends across the sky to a pinkish butterscotch instead of a pale blue. The reason for this difference in colours is complex. Mars’s atmosphere, thin in gasses and abundant with a reddish dust, reflects and scatters the sunlight differently from ours, which is dense with gases and carries far less dust. Mars’s clouds look different too. Those to the right of Perseverance’s shot resemble Cirrus more than any other of our cloud formations – and they’re likely composed of the same water ice crystals that make up Cirrus. But these Martian clouds appear like blue flames, and NASA doesn’t know for sure what atmospheric conditions could have caused them to take on this form.

To us, the blue looks to be part of an iridescent spectrum caused by the sunlight bending, or diffracting, around the cloud’s tiny ice particles. As for the dancing-flame shapes, it’s hard to say. Extraterrestrial cloud are not our department. You’ll need to contact the Interplanetary Cloud Appreciation Society.

NASA, JPL-Caltech, Kevin M. Gill Processing: Rogelio Bernal Andreo