One morning last week near the end of a midnight shift, I noticed a sun dog to the east. Sun dogs are optical phenomenon that are formed from a low sun angle (rising or setting sun) combined with transparent cirrus clouds. The tiny ice crystals that compose cirus clouds reflect and refract the incoming sunlight, producing a horizontally offset bright spot. Although this particular one didn’t exhibit much in the way of color, some sun dogs will display a prism or rainbow color spectrum along the edges of the bright spot. In the two pictures below, the view is toward the east as the sun was rising; the brighter spot to the right is the sun and the other irregular-shaped spot to the left side of the frame is the sun dog.

sun dog 1

sun dog 2

There was a great lightning show from a slow moving cluster of storms over the south side of Albuquerque tonight. This first shot was a 39 second exposure that I took from the backyard. You can see the lights of a plane streaking across the frame as it departed and turned toward me. The storms had just moved south of the airport, and departing aircraft were obviously gettting routed north away from the convection.
There were also some faint “anvil crawlers” on the north side of the storms as seen below.