Explanation:
What's happened to the Sun?
Sometimes it looks like the Sun is being viewed through a giant
lens.
In the featured video, however, there are actually millions of tiny lenses:
ice crystals.
Water may freeze in the
atmosphere into small, flat, six-sided, ice crystals.
As these crystals flutter to the ground, much time is spent
with their
faces flat and parallel to the ground.
An observer may find themselves in the same plane as
many of the falling ice crystals near sunrise or sunset.
During this alignment, each crystal can act like a miniature lens,
refracting sunlight into our
view and creating
phenomena like parhelia, the technical term for
sundogs.
The
featured video was taken a month ago
on the side of a ski hill at the
Vemdalen Ski Resort near
Stockholm,
Sweden.
Visible in the center is the most direct image of the
Sun, while two bright
sundogs glow prominently from both the left and the right.
Also visible is the bright
22 degree halo -- as well as the rarer and much fainter
46 degree halo --
also created by
sunlight reflecting off of atmospheric ice
crystals.
