The horizon-hugging sun of autumn and spring passing through the crisp, frosty air often whistles to her a pair of trusty companions: sundogs.
SUNN - dawg
Simply, sunlight refracting through ice crystals in the clouds creating a lens or halo effect in the sky.
Listed among my favourite words is sundog.
We had finished our recent Sunday Run and had gathered (socially distantly, of course) in the parking lot to chat and chatter. In the frosty sky to the east the glare of the sunlight through the wisps of clouds highlighted a pair of sundogs punctuating hours of the long spring dawn.
With similar optical physics to how a rainbow appears, I suspect, the photons of light of our sun scatter in a predictable path as they pass through the billions of billions of microscopic ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere. The sky itself acts as though it is a miles-wide prism or lens, and the illusion that meets our eyes is a pair of visible flares approximately twenty-two degrees to the left and the right of the sun itself.
Or more poetically, the sun tracks through these cool spring skies with her sundogs by her side and surveys the world as it thaws beneath our feet.
