Sun Dogs

 

Today I want to talk about a really cool, but also fairly common whether event called a sun dog or a solar halo.

Image taken from my porch on Presidents Day a few weeks ago

A sun dog is when you see a halo, or even a rainbow around the sun. I wanted to talk about Sun Dogs today because of what I recently learned about them:

“A solar halo forms when sunlight is refracted off ice crystals in cirrus clouds. The halos — solar during the day and lunar at night — are similar to what is created when sunlight is refracted off water coming out of a garden hose.

Native Americans believed the appearance of a sun dog or halo meant a storm would come within five days — and that holds true about 90 percent of the time outside of the summer months, when the accuracy rate falls to 70 percent, according to KSL's chief meteorologist, Kevin Eubank.”

So if somehow you manage to find yourself in a post-apocalyptic world or really off the grid where you do not have access to weather reports in any way shape or form, it is a fairly reliable indicator of an approaching storm.

I saw one 2 days in a row at work last week, and saw this one on the hike to Shepard Creek we did on Saturday. We did get a storm shortly after Presidents Day, we got a small storm on Sunday, and we have another one coming in the next few days. So, since learning this random fact, it has been 100% accurate at predicting storms.

 

Landis helped me take this one.

I had to dig back to 2010 to find this old image of a lunar halo. 

2021 Edit: This is not a lunar halo. This is actually called a corona. A true lunar halo looks like a solar one. Like this:

Lunar Halo.

Now I wonder if the percentages this meteorologist referenced apply to both lunar and solar, I believe it does.

Anyway, yes very common, but still really cool, and it’s really cool to learn that they can help predict a storm.

Word of warning, even with sunglasses on you should never look directly at the sun, and you really shouldn’t look through a camera lens at it either. When I notice them, I try to look at the halo, rather than the sun, set my camera to what I think will work best, and point it in the general direction and click. Your eyes are precious, protect them.