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*Here's something I've not seen before, even in a photo:
http://www.spaceweather.com/swpod2005/0 … Sub-sundog
It's a very large image. Taken 34,000 ft. above the Canadian arctic, last week; photographer is Mr. Brian Whittaker.
Is it a rainbow? No. A sundog? No.
Those are things you see looking up. Brian was looking down.
Atmospheric optics expert Les Cowley explains what Brian saw: "It's a sub-sundog."
"Look down from the sunny side of an aircraft," he continues, "and you will often see a dazzling reflection of the sun in the clouds. This is a subsun, formed by millions of plate shaped ice crystals acting as mirrors. Sometimes the subsun is flanked by two colorful sub-sundogs. They are made in the same way as ordinary sundogs except that sunlight is beamed upwards by an extra reflection inside each ice crystal. They seem as though produced by the bright light of the subsun but they are not--almost all the halos we ever see come from sunrays that have touched just one ice crystal. Look out for other sub-horizon halos, no one has yet photographed a sub-circumzenithal arc--you could be the first!
Well...that privilege belongs to folks who frequently fly, no doubt. :;): In fact, I don't recall having heard of this phenomenon before, either...and never considered it might be a possibility. :hm:
--Cindy
We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...
--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)
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