Sundogs and Eyeballs

Have you ever seen a 'sundog'?
It looks like a gigantic iris in the sky surrounded by a huge circular rainbow. Like God's eye, just checking in to see how everything on Earth is going.

We have had quite few here in Fargo lately. It's amazing to wake up to a rainbow that lasts for such a long time on the horizon. It's really bright and nearly blinds you, but if you hold up your hand over the central 'sun' part, the rainbow gets even brighter. Remarkable, just remarkable how God's Glory reveals itself in our everyday lives!


Official Definition:
Sundogs typically, but not exclusively, appear when the sun is low, e.g. at sunrise and sunset, and the atmosphere is filled with ice crystal forming cirrus clouds, but diamond dust and ice fog can also produce them. They are often bright white patches of light looking much like the sun or a comet, and occasionally are confused with those phenomena. Sometimes they exhibit a spectrum of colours, ranging from red closest to the sun to a pale bluish tail stretching away from the sun.[1] White sundogs are caused by light reflected off of atmospheric ice crystals, while coloured sundogs are caused by light refracted through them. White sundogs are also thought to be caused by the light from the sun reflecting off of water on the ground and focusing the reflected light on the clouds above.

The ice crystals causing atmospheric phenomena are shaped as hexagonal prisms (ice Ih, e.g. with a hexagonal top and bottom and six rectangular sides). Some of these crystals are elongated, some are flat; the latter causing crisp and bright sundogs if evenly oriented with their hexagonal ends aligned horizontally, while the former produces other atmospheric phenomena, such as parhelic circles, 22° halos, circumzenithal arcs, upper tangent arcs, and lower tangent arcs.