I did not know what's called because I never see awesome with my naked eyes. Glad my camera capture that! I look up sundog in google and paste in here. I was outside feeling COLD! Cold bites my hands holding camera. Interesting ice crystal forming in cirrus clouds in sky.
sundogs typically, but not exclusively, appear when the sun is low, e.g. at sunrise and sunset, and the atmosphere is filled with ice crystals 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 colored sundogs are caused by light refracted through them.
The ice crystals causing atmospheric phenomenon 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 phenomenon, such as parhelic circles, 22° halos, circumzenithal arcs, upper tangent arcs, and lower tangent arcs. A mixture of various crystals with different alignments produces several of these phenomena at the same time.[1]
Variant of a parhelion at the South Pole. The sun is obscured.
When sunlight passes through the sides of a flat crystal, both the angle of the sun rays and the orientation of the crystals affects the shape and colour of the sundogs. Misaligned or wobbling crystals produce colourful and elongated sundogs, while light passing through the crystal in non-optimal deviation angles (up to 50°) produces the "tail" of the sundog stretching away from the sun. As refraction is dependent of wavelength, the sundogs tend to have red inner edges while the colours farther from the sun tend to be more bluish-white as colours increasingly overlap.[1][2]
When the sun is low, the two sundogs are located on the circle of the 22° halo. As the sun rises, the sundogs slowly move along the parhelic circle away from the sun, finally, to vanish as the sun reaches 61° over the horizon[1] (e.g. the sundogs move from the 22° halo to the circumscribed halo.)[3]
On Earth, the first planet (counting from the sun) with significant amounts of ice crystal-carrying clouds, the pair of sundogs flanking the sun are aligned with the horizon. On other planets and moons where water and ice are less prevalent, however, various crystal structures produce different halos. On the giant gas planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—other crystals form the clouds of ammonia, methane, and other substances that can produce halos with four or more sundogs.[4]
