Friday, January 8, 2010

Sun Dog Rainbow...NOT Snow Dog Rainbow

I honestly captured this within seconds outside my office. I had never seen a "vertical rainbow" let alone one in the Snowy weather. My Boss informed me that they are called "Snow dog Rainbows" as I researched a little more they are "Sundog" rainbows! Close enough Doc! Just thought it was beautiful and totally different! Sundogs are formed by plate shaped hexagonal ice crystals in high and cold cirrus clouds or - during very cold weather - by ice crystals called diamond dust drifting in the air at low level.

Sundog forming rays enter a near vertical(they don't arch like a regular rainbow) prism side face of a crystal and exit through a second side face inclined 60° to the first. There is net refraction at each face and the light is dispersed into colors. There is no single angle of deviation through the crystal, which effectively acts as a 60 degree prism, but the minimum angle of deviation is ~22°. This corresponds to the distance of the inner edge of the sundog from the sun when the sun is low.

As the sun rises higher the rays passing through the crystals are increasingly skewed from the horizontal plane. Their angle of deviation increases and the sundogs move further from the sun. However, they always stay at the same altitude as the sun.

Sundogs are red colored at the side nearest the sun. Farther out the colors grade through oranges to blue. However, the colors overlap considerably and so are muted, never pure or saturated. The colors of the sundog finally merge into the white of the parhelic circle (if the latter is visible).

It is possible to theoretically predict the forms of sundogs as would be seen on other planets and moons. Mars might have sundogs formed by both water-ice and CO2-ice. 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.

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