Kees Floor, Weather, February 2012.

Figure 1. Glory on stratocumulus clouds over the Pacific Ocean, west of Baja California, Mexico, observed from space on 20 May 2008 by MODIS on the Aqua satellite. The image in natural colour was saturation-enhanced to make the glory effect better visible. Von Kármàn vortices can be seen downwind from Isla de Guadalupe. (Courtesy NASA’s Earth Observatory.)

Extra figure. Glory on stratocumulus clouds over the Pacific Ocean, west of Baja California, Mexico, observed from space on 3 June 2006 by MODIS on the Aqua satellite. The image in natural colour was saturation-enhanced to make the glory effect better visible. Von Kármàn vortices can be seen downwind from Isla de Guadalupe. (Courtesy NASA’s Earth Observatory.)
The glory is an optical phenomenon, consisting of concentric coloured rings of a few degrees in diameter. It can be observed by looking down on water clouds around the antisolar point, which is the point on the cloud where the shadow of an observer's head would be.
The first scientific reports of glories were made in the 18th century by Antonio de Ulloa, a captain of the Spanish Navy, from Mt Pambamarca in Ecuador (Lynch and Futterman 1991). In those days the only possibility for an observer to be above the clouds was in mountainous areas or near the steam of geysers and warm water springs. In the following centuries the number of possible viewpoints was extended each century:
" In the 19th century glories were seen from incidentally operating hot air balloons, like the one of the French meteorologist and aviator Gaston Tissandier.
" In the 20th century the glory became a rather common phenomenon, frequently observed from airplanes.
" In the 21st century, glories can be even observed from space, as they sometimes appear on satellite imagery.
Glory rings observed from space were detected on a photograph taken from an altitude of 278 km on January 28, 2003 by a Xybion radiometric camera on board the space shuttle Colombia (Laven, 2005; Israelevich et al., 2009). However, most imagery from space is based on data from instruments that scan the earth's surface and the clouds above it from an altitude of about 700 km in swaths perpendicular to the projection of the path followed by the satellite. Instead of circular rings, as seen by an observer or taken by a camera, an individual swath gives a horizontal cross section through the glory circle, containing two coloured areas. The previous and next swaths do the same. As a result a glory on satellite imagery in natural colours will typically consist of two elongated, coloured bands parallel to the projection of the path of the satellite.
In figure 1 an example is given of a glory observed from space by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Aqua satellite. The image in natural colours was saturation enhanced to make the glory effect better visible. More examples are available from http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/imagery/gallery.cgi (keyword=glory).
The observations of glories from space show that the distance from the observer to the clouds is not important. The phenomenon can be seen from a viewing distance of a few meters - e.g. in the steam of geysers and warm water springs - to a viewing distance of 700 km on satellite imagery in natural colours.

Acknowledgement
The advice of A. Stepek, G.P. Können and G.H. Floor in the preparation of this note is gratefully acknowledged.

References
Israelevich, P.L., J. H. Joseph, Z. Levin, and Y. Yair 2009. First observation of a glory from space. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 90: 1772-1774.
Laven, P. 2005. Atmospheric glories: simulations and observations. Applied Optics 44 (27): 5667-5674.
Lynch, D.K. and Futterman, S.N. 1991. Ulloa's observations of the glory, fogbow, and an unidentified phenomenon. Applied Optics 30 (24): 3538-3541.

The first scientific reports of glories were made in the 18th century by Antonio de Ulloa, a captain of the Spanish Navy, from Mt Pambamarca in Ecuador.

In the 19th century glories were seen from incidentally operating hot air balloons, like the one of the French meteorologist and aviator Gaston Tissandier.

 
 
Glory around the shadow of Space Shuttle Atlantis, 2011
Glory over the Paxcific Occean, 2002.