Ladies and Gentlemen, Your Sun Dogs for Today
Posted on October 11, 2011 Posted by John Scalzi 18 Comments
Handcrafted for your delight. Yes, ice fairies launched themselves into the sky to make them. You can see their trails crisscrossing below the sun! What? You don’t think those are ice fairy tracks? Well, believe what you want, atheist.
Clearly this is propaganda for the librul ice fairy agenda! BLOCKED!
Also an upper tangent arc. We got some of those yesterday, as well as a full halo around the Sun. Wish I had my camera or even my cell phone.
OK, I have to admit my ignorance here. What is a Sun Dog?
I have some buddies that will be interested to hear you called them Ice Fairies…
Nice pic by the way.
I initially read “buddies” as “bidders”. Is my subconscious telling me there’s a market in ice fairies?
Are you implying that we’re getting monsoonal rain instead of beautiful blue skies in Seattle because I’m an atheist?
I suppose it could just be because it’s October in Seattle.
@dave brandson…
“I suppose it could just be because it’s
October inSeattle.”Fixed (unless those HTML tags fail…)
Snoopy:
See those little rainbow smudges on either side of the sun, toward the edges of the picture? Those are sun dogs.
I walked out of a Food Lion Store (it was many years ago) and the guy parked next to me was standing beside his car staring up in the sky. After I loaded my groceries I noticed he was still staring and also snapping some pictures.
With a sigh, and knowing the outcome would be bad, I asked the guy what the deal was. He then proceeded to tell me that he was looking at the contrails in the sky (the lines left by planes) because he had never seen such an obvious pattern like it before. He continued to explain that this was a secret government program ran by the CIA that conducted various experiments on us citizens. He even had brochures readily available. At this point, I nodded my head, smiled and slowly entered my car. As I left I noticed in the rear view mirror he was still taking pictures and staring at the sky.
rickg: No, we have two seasons here: Wet and Dry.
Rickg:
Shhhhhh…. We’re not supposed to tell outsiders about the ay-dray eason-say. Didn’t you get the memo?
durrr…. My last comment should have been directed at Eric, not Rickg.
Believe me, if there were Ice Fairies about Chateau Scalzi, the F-16’s at Wright-Patterson and Springfield would be scrambled to shoot them down.
You could make a million dollars selling pictures like that!
Then you’d be a sun dog millionaire… *ducks and runs*
Impressive!
I once saw an atmospheric phenomenon that wasn’t so much a sun dog (not ice crystals) as a seeming second sun (cloud refraction.) I also once got to see a circumzenital arc—just a swath of rainbow straight up in the sky. Still don’t know what prompted me to look up.
Xopher: *groan*!
Scalzi: Hey now, just because I’m an atheist doesn’t mean I can’t believe in ice fairies! Hell, sometimes I think it makes more sense than the biblical “god” whom I’m either supposed to unconditionally love, or unconditionally fear, depending on whose version I’m supposed to take seriously.
woof