Monday, March 3, 2014

Looking. Looking, Looking (for Spring)!


So very tired of winter, please "Go away"! Who does that sound like kids? We, central Kansas, are some of the sufferers of the endless cold and snow in the Midwest! We did get a particularly beautiful sight back on February 5th, a Sundog!



         


 
It is beautiful and so bright and means that it's pretty damn cold outside!
 Here is the definition from Wikipedia
Sundogs are commonly made by the refraction of light from plate-shaped hexagonal ice crystals in high and cold cirrus clouds or, during very cold weather, these ice crystals are called diamond dust, and drift in the air at low levels. These crystals act as prisms, bending the light rays passing through them with a minimum deflection of 22°. If the crystals are randomly oriented, a complete ring around the sun is seen — a halo. But often, as the crystals sink through the air, they become vertically aligned, so sunlight is refracted horizontally — in this case, sundogs are seen.
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 farther from the sun.[8] However, they always stay at the same elevation 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).

This was a regular site when we lived in North Dakota, but Kansas not so much and that's the way I like it!

I have been sewing and want to post a few pictures of my projects, so will have to work on uploading pictures and post about them very soon.
Here's to warmer days!!!!!!! With notes of Spring!!!!!

2 comments:

  1. When you find spring, would you send it down here too?!? I'm so ready for it.

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  2. I've never heard of it but it's a gorgeous display. Mother Nature has been wicked this Winter but no one does natural beauties quite like her. We've had odd events too. Good news is we have daffodil shoots now peeking out of the earth. Spring really is going to come.

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