Sunrise Phenomenon
So this morning was a bit different. Malachi is normally the trooper in the bunch, always being the first to deal with the fact that he must wake up and get ready for school, the first one to be showered and dressed, and the first to bounce back after being ill. But today, it was Sara that rode alone with Daddy to school. I wasn’t sure if that was the reason things felt a bit out of place this a.m. until I made a few of the normal sharp curve on my 20 minute commute to work. It then hit me that it was much darker than most days at 0700. The trees were sharp dark shadows against a gorgeous sky of blue and pink. When I finally saw the sky I was baffled. There was a “hot spot” of pink on the horizon, perfectly centered by a vertical beam of light. I scrambled for my camera knowing I didn’t have much time to capture the moment, and fully aware the lens might not capture the real effect God had created. I tried one parked and one while still driving … here they are.
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Hello - Watching one as I type - these phenomenae (?) are well known, and in Googling to remind myself what they are called, I found your pix. We are recently snow-covered here, and a tree is profiled by todays rising sun.
Let me know if sokmeone tells you what these ‘vertical colmuns’ of beauty are called.
They are commonly called ’sun pillars’, and googling said term shows a lot. Also try http://www.aoptics.co.uk for other such goodies of which I like crepuscular and especially anti-crepuscular rays. On a good day in a flat place one can see both at once, and realize they (like all rays of lightt friom the sun) are parallel lines since the sun is so nearly infinitely far away. Just like rails on a giant train track in the sky, such rays come from the far off sun, pass overhead and converge again in the distance (opposite the sun). One can even appreciate the apparent curve overhead.