2018.01.30 Tuesday: According to our local weathermen, the small bright object in the sky is a Sun dog.
I had to look up this term, and found that a sun dog is a mock sun -- a concentrated patch of sunlight occasionally seen about 22° to the left or right of the Sun.. (This one is to the right of the sun, which was swiftly approaching the horizon near sunset.)
According to wikipedia, sun dogs are caused by the refraction of light from hexagonal ice crystals in the atmosphere. They 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.
