Perhelic Circle

On Saturday, while we were spending hours shoveling, I noticed the sun doing cool things - reflecting on some clouds in a cool

way, when I saw a HUGE sun dog around the sun. It's hard to explain what was going on, but as my kids said, "there are 4 suns, mom!" And as part of the sun dog, there was an inverted rainbow. I think someone called it a "parhelic circle." All I know is that it was WAY cool, and the weather guy on channel 5 said it was very rare to see all that in one incident. So I took some pictures. They aren't the best - we were too close to get a picture of the whole sun dog, and I haven't taken the time to put it into photoshop to put it as a panoramic view. But I thought they were pretty cool!

This looked like an inverted rainbow. It's called a circumzenital arc (or so Wikipedia says.). The colors were SO vibrant!!

Part of the sun dog and the parhelic circle

The other part of the sundog, more of the parhelic circle

The parhelic circle is apparently the sun reflecting in a horizontal way in the sky. Wikipedia says it much better than I!!!

Another shot of the circumzenithal arc