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
