We were on our way home when my husband spotted what looked like a faint sun dog...well half of a sun dog. I waited and waited but the other side of the arc never appeared and the whole thing disappeared in a matter of a few minutes. You can barely see it on the upper left side of the picture...looks like a rainbow.
Here's an earlier picture of a full Sun Dog to give you an idea of what they usually look like:
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).
@harbie@dannydavies Thank you so much for your comments & interest in the Sun Dog picture...sorry for being so vague on what they are. They are most common on really cold days in January & February so I was surprised to see one over the weekend but it was in the 20's here so that's probably why it was so weak and not fully formed.
Here's an earlier picture I took of a sun dog with an explanation of what they are....I know them when I see them but can't explain them very well so I'll let the experts at Wikipedia do that for me! :)
Like Harbie, what is a sun dog.
Here's an earlier picture I took of a sun dog with an explanation of what they are....I know them when I see them but can't explain them very well so I'll let the experts at Wikipedia do that for me! :)