A breathtaking rare weather condition left Costa Ricans in awe on Tuesday when they looked up into the sky and saw what appeared to be a unique, multicolored cloud.

Witness Jessie Montealegre captured the beautiful rainbow-like cloud, which could be seen in San Jose, Escazu and Hatillo, in a YouTube video.

"The skies opened up as if it were the end of times," she wrote in the description box underneath on YouTube.

"Suddenly a massive amount of people stopped and stood still as they were astonished at how the skies opened up. It was a nice coincidence that the video was taken on Costa Rica's Independence Day," she said.

Following the viral video, Internet users touted the rainbow cloud formation as "the end of days" and a "sign of God," reports Mashable.

However, weather experts explained that the marvelous sight was an example of a weather phenomenon called cloud iridescence. According to Peggy Lamone, senior scientist emerita at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the dazzling event occurs when something in the area like the top of a rain cloud or a nearby mountain pushes air upward.

"When the air gets lifted upward and there is enough moisture, it condenses into water droplets," Lamone told The Huffington Post. "These tiny particles interact with the light by a process called diffraction. It separates the light, much like a prism, into different colors."

"My suspicion is that the sun was nearby," she added.

NASA also explained the science behind a cloud iridescence after a similar cloud appeared over Boulder, Colorado, back in 2007.

"These clouds are formed of small water droplets of nearly uniform size. When the Sun is in the right position and mostly hidden by thick clouds, these thinner clouds significantly diffract sunlight in a nearly coherent manner, with different colors being deflected by different amounts. Therefore, different colors will come to the observer from slightly different directions."

Watch footage of the cloud below.