Sun dog

[Coast]

Just about captured these pictures of a Sun dog over Eastbourne earlier this afternoon:

https://forum.netweather.tv/gallery/image/16720-sundog-1/

https://forum.netweather.tv/gallery/image/16721-sundog-2/

Must have been cold up there:

Sundogs are made commonly of plate-shaped hexagonal ice crystals in high and cold cirrus clouds or, during very cold weather, by ice crystals called diamond dust drifting in the air at low levels. These crystals act as prisms, bending the light rays passing through them with a minimum deflection of 22°. If the crystals are randomly oriented, a complete ring around the sun is seen — a halo. But often, as the crystals sink through the air they become vertically aligned, so sunlight is refracted horizontally — in this case, sundogs are seen. As the sun rises higher, the rays passing through the crystals are increasingly skewed from the horizontal plane. Their angle of deviation increases and the sundogs move further from the sun.[4] However, they always stay at the same elevation as the sun.

Sundogs are red-colored at the side nearest the sun. Farther out the colors grade through oranges to blue. However, the colors overlap considerably and so are muted, never pure or saturated. The colors of the sundog finally merge into the white of the parhelic circle (if the latter is visible).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_dog

Edited December 2, 2012 by Coast

[Kent Snow]

Lovely photos!

[Bluebreezer54]

Nice photo's Coast. I managed to capture a sun dog in Hastings this afternoon. I hope it shows up in this photo