Monday, December 22, 2008

Who Let the (Sun) Dogs Out?

I just saw on Spaceweather an image of a sun dog from Grafton, Iowa.
Sundogs are one of many atmospheric phenomena caused by sunlight reflecting off of ice crystals...and there are a lot of ice crystals near Racine right now. The Weather Underground also lists clear skies. So go outside and look up. Don't look directly at the Sun...look around it. You might see Sundogs, arcs, or halos around the Sun.

The best Sun dogs I ever saw were in February of 1988 when I was driving to Fermilab with my college physics club. We left at about 3:00am and got the sunrise over the plains of Illinois with spectacular Sun dogs (and it was frakkin cold...don't think it got above 10 below zero that day!)

I will leave you with picture of a halo I took in Tucson...yes, we get some ice crystals here sometimes as well!

3 comments:

drewzepmeister said...

I've seen these before. Always a good sight to see.

MinnesotaChick said...

Pretty cool looking!

OrbsCorbs said...

And I always thought it was my eyes acting up.