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Sundog Over Eastbourne
Jan. 28th, 2022 05:45 pmWe went to have a second look at the Eastbourne house, check a thing or two and show it off to my sister and bro-in-law. We understood it to be about ten minutes from the beach, so I walked the distance- and it is.
While I was poking about in the garden, looking to see what plants there were, I spotted a smear of rainbow light to the right hand side of the sun. I've recently learned- from an LJ friend- that this phenomenon is called a sundog- or to be scientific about it- a parhelion. Sun dogs are rare- and I can't think I've ever seen one before. They're caused by the refraction of sunlight by ice crystals in the upper atmosphere. Wikipedia has a list of historically significant occasions on which they've shown up and been taken for omens- as- for example- on the morning of the Battle of Mortimer's Cross in 1461, when the future Edward IV parsed the appearance of two sundogs on either side of the sun as representing himself and his two brothers- the glorious sonnes of York- and so a portent of the victory which he duly went ahead and won. The incident is dramatized- in a garbled manner- in Shakespeare's Henry VI part 3.
This isn't my picture, but it's a fair representation of what I saw. It was taken in Austria by Welleschik in 2007.
While I was poking about in the garden, looking to see what plants there were, I spotted a smear of rainbow light to the right hand side of the sun. I've recently learned- from an LJ friend- that this phenomenon is called a sundog- or to be scientific about it- a parhelion. Sun dogs are rare- and I can't think I've ever seen one before. They're caused by the refraction of sunlight by ice crystals in the upper atmosphere. Wikipedia has a list of historically significant occasions on which they've shown up and been taken for omens- as- for example- on the morning of the Battle of Mortimer's Cross in 1461, when the future Edward IV parsed the appearance of two sundogs on either side of the sun as representing himself and his two brothers- the glorious sonnes of York- and so a portent of the victory which he duly went ahead and won. The incident is dramatized- in a garbled manner- in Shakespeare's Henry VI part 3.
This isn't my picture, but it's a fair representation of what I saw. It was taken in Austria by Welleschik in 2007.
