WOW! Have you ever seen anything like this? Well I never had until last Tuesday morning (January 27, 2009). This amazing sight was visible for just a couple of hours that morning.
While taking the kids to school, which is just as the sun is coming up, the kids and I noticed the sunrise seemed to be a little "different." Sierra's school is at the east end of town, so as we continued in that direction we kept watching. Once the sun was just above the horizon, we noticed that there was not just one sun...but THREE! We were definitely stunned and amazed by this sight, not to mention a little uneasy...especially considering I had never seen nor heard of anything like this before (I guess I didn't pay enough attention in science!!) Although I was fairly confident in my intellectual mind that it was some sort of weather phenomenon, "those" thoughts inevitably creep in...is this the end? the Second Coming? did the sun "split" or explode? So I called my Dad and asked him if he had ever seen 3 suns before to which he of course responded "What?!?...No!"...and was probably thinking...."she has lost it!" Then I told him that the temperature was -23 and then he realized what I was talking about.
The Superintendent of the schools here noticed it too and called all the schools and asked them to take the kids outside to check it out, since I guess it's a fairly rare occurrence (but not so rare as to be "miraculous"). The boys taught me later that they are called Sun Dogs...or more accurately, the two "suns" on each side of the real sun are the Sun Dogs, and it is caused by a specific crystal formation in the air mixed with the sunlight, and it is usually only visible when the sun is near the horizon.
It was pretty neat to see and was extremely difficult to capture on my camera, because I couldn't get far enough away to capture all 3 "suns." So the picture is a composite panoramic (which is the only way my "ancient" 3 year old camera will take a panoramic), so you can see a line where the two pictures are put together, (there are lots of much better photos out there on the web too) but it is definitely the exact image we saw that morning. AWESOME!
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