Many of us are lucky enough to see what are often described as beautiful splashes of light, or rainbow types of displays in the sky! But….no rain, so what are they?
These are halos, and sundogs! The halos are more common, and occur when there is a very thin sheet of cirrostratus clouds. This layer is very thin, and the sun shines through them, but the ice crystals, which make up the cirrostratus clouds, bend the sun light at a specific angle which makes the halo effect. You can see this around the moon sometimes too. Sun dogs are those brighter spots on each side of the halo. We see these when the sun is fairly low in the sky, and there must also be some of those high thin clouds which contain ice crystals that the light can refract off of. For sundogs, they have to be just the right kind of ice crystals, ….6 sided and shaped sort of like short pencils. When those crystals float straight up and down in the air, it refracts, or bends the light in just the right way to cause a sundog. Sundogs do tend to be brightest in the winter, because that is when this type of ice crystal is most common, …But they can be seen any time of year. And if you see
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