Saw lots of tweets about sun dog sightings in Saint Paul this morning. I confess, I had no idea what a sun dog was.
A sun dog or sundog (scientific name parhelion, plural parhelia, for “beside the sun”) is a common bright circular spot on a solar halo. It is an atmospheric optical phenomenon primarily associated with the reflection or refraction of sunlight by small ice crystals making up cirrus or cirrostratus clouds. Often, two sun dogs can be seen (one on each side of the sun) simultaneously.
I was just about to tweet asking for photos when Stephanie posted one. Crazy! Here it is. Thanks, Steph!
Originally uploaded by slolee.
If you grabbed a photo, drop it in the fresh.mn flickr pool (or send me a link if you’re not on flickr) and I’ll add it to this post.
4 Comments
that is amazing!
I know, right? I’ve never seen one before!
Whoa, we saw this and just thought it was a messed up rainbow. S-m-r-t.
I have heard of sundogs all of my life. Never knew the scientific name of them so I looked it up on google. Parhelion, or beside the sun. We saw two huge sundogs back on 1978 before the blizzard of ‘78. My dad told my mom it was too cold to snow. Well about 3 days later we had the worst blizzard to date! It snowed for weeks on end, snow piled up for months, and didn’t melt away until April. I have seen many sundogs, usually in the evening, but not at dawn. They speak of a false sunrise in the movie the Deer Hunter, which was actually a sundog. Very interesting, Loved your coments. I saw two rather large sundogs last Monday night, it has been raining all week, off and on and Friday and Saturday we had terrible rain and thunderstorms.
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