Tag Archives: Astronomical photography

Amazing Brief and Stunning Sun Dog Circle in Sky

Laurie says:

I was going for my usual Pandemic Shadows photography walk, when I saw a stunning “Sky Shadow” and decided to add it to my Pandemic Shadow gallery.
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So I started looking up at the sky (I am usually looking down for shadows). To my amazement there was a beautiful circle around the sun. I’d never seen anything like it before.

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It’s called a Sun Dog. The sun dog is a member of the family of halos caused by the refraction of sunlight by ice crystals in the atmosphere. Sun dogs typically appear as a pair of subtly colored patches of light, around 22″ to the left and right of the Sun, and at the same altitude above the horizon as the Sun. They can be seen anywhere in the world during any season, but are not always obvious or bright. Sun dogs are best seen and most conspicuous when the Sun is near the horizon. – Wikepedia

The circle I saw is apparently a variation of this. I took a number of photos (not surprisingly). The two below show different views and are the finest of the images.

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I’m still blown away by the gift of such unforgettable images that were only briefly in the sky.

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My Eclipse Photos

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Laurie says:

I drove to the eclipse in August of 2017. There were places north of San Francisco where the sun was going to be in total eclipse. I ended up in Ontario, Oregon, a small town on the Idaho border. There was a park in the middle of town and about 20 or 30 people were gathered there to see the eclipse.
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Across from one side of the park was a sidewalk with red leafed trees. I was watching the beginning of the eclipse and also watching the shadows through the leaves on the sidewalk. I remembered from a previous minor eclipse in San Francisco about the shadows.
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One of the safe ways of observing a solar eclipse is to poke a small hole in the side of a box, hold it up to the sun, and watch the small projection on the inside of the box. This is the principle of the pin-hole camera. Sunlight filtering through the leaves of a tree acts similarly, except that there is an array of pinholes, and therefore an array of images on the ground of the sun being eaten by the dragon. The images disappear at totality, of course, and then reappear, unwinding the eclipse, as the sun emerges from behind the moon.
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I was fascinating by the changing shapes of the reflected eclipse on the ground. I did see the eclipse and it was stunning, but as an artist I was much more involved in the shadow reflections. I took a lot of photos, and the three here are from the final prints of photos that I shot just before and after the totality.

I have rarely had a more involving or joyous photographic experience.