When you see Sun Dogs you just know it's cold outside...and it was definitely cold this morning. Somewhere around -10 to -12 degrees. I literally froze my fingers off for this one! But I don't see them all that often so I put on warmest clothes, grabbed my gear, crossed my fingers the car would start and down the road I went to this little creek to try and capture it.
If you don't know what a sun dog is....here's a little info from Wikipedia!
Sun Dog Formation and Characteristics:
Sundogs are commonly made by the refraction of light from plate-shaped hexagonal ice crystals in high and cold cirrus clouds or, during very cold weather, these ice crystals are called diamond dust, and drift in the air at low levels. These crystals act as prisms, bending the light rays passing through them with a minimum deflection of 22°. If the crystals are randomly oriented, a complete ring around the sun is seen — a halo. But often, as the crystals sink through the air, they become vertically aligned, so sunlight is refracted horizontally — in this case, sundogs are seen.
As the sun rises higher, the rays passing through the crystals are increasingly skewed from the horizontal plane. Their angle of deviation increases, and the sundogs move further from the sun.[8] However, they always stay at the same elevation as the sun.
Sundogs are red-colored at the side nearest the sun. Farther out the colors grade through oranges to blue. However, the colors overlap considerably and so are muted, never pure or saturated. The colors of the sundog finally merge into the white of the parhelic circle (if the latter is visible).
When I look at the sun, I'm sure I see it flickering.
fav.