Sunrise by candlelight?
Every morning, Grandma made a point of checking the clouds. She believed that clouds could tell us a lot about the incoming weather; every now and again she spotted something quite magical.
Last month Helen Haley who lives in Windsor, N.S., also looked up and saw something quite beautiful. She wasn’t sure what it was so she wrote me a lovely letter. In it she explained how one morning last winter, she and her husband Leslie saw what she described as a strange shaft of sunlight at sunrise. They didn’t have a camera handy so they drew a few very intricate images to illustrate what they saw. From them I could see that the sun appeared to have been just below the horizon with a very bright glowing shaft of light extending upward.
The drawing and excellent descriptions lead me to believe that Helen and Leslie witnessed a solar or sun pillar: an optical illusion that looks like the flame on a candle.
A sun pillar is a vertical shaft of light that reaches straight up from the rising or setting sun. Sun pillars form when sunlight reflects off the surfaces of falling ice crystals. Most times, those ice crystals are associated with thin, high-level cirrostratus clouds. Since pillars are caused by the interaction of light with ice crystals, they belong to the family of halos.
The crystals responsible for light pillars usually consist of flat, hexagonal plates, which tend to fall more or less horizontally through the air. Their surfaces act as giant mirrors, reflecting light up and sometimes down; the bigger the crystals, the more pronounced this effect. These shafts of light are at their best within a few minutes of sunrise or sunset. Initially they have about the same colour and width as the sun, but sun pillars will gradually change from orange-white to red-orange. They are much more common in the winter when arctic air sinks down over the region and the necessary ice crystals are plentiful.
Now from the believe it or not file: the pillars are not physically over the light source – in this case the sun. Like all halos they are purely the collected light beams from all the millions of crystals that just happen to be reflecting light towards your eyes!
A little science to help Mother Nature with the magic!