Sundog! This mysterious sky phenomenon baffled John Bourke during the Great Sioux War of 1876-77. In his book ‘Mackenzie’s Last Fight with the Cheyennes: A Winter Campaign in Wyoming and Montana, he describes the three suns phenomenon as follow:
“Part of the time we marched in the teeth of a biting storm of snow, and at every hour of the day the sun could be discerned sulking behind soft grey mists in company with rivals, known in the language of the plains as ‘Sun-dogs’, whose parahelic splendors warned the traveller of the approach of the ever-to-be-dreaded ‘blizzard’.“
The powerful description of this mysterious sky phenomenon depicts exactly what people in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, Western Siberia, Russia experienced on Nov. 25 due to extreme low temperatures. AND an ever-to-be-dreaded ‘blizzard’ could follow.
That is just insane!
We see sun dogs in the summer in south Texas. It is caused by thunderstorm cirrus (anvil cloud) and is very seldom accompanied by any other halo phenomenon and never by blizzards.
We see this all the time in Western Canada, in the winter.
In autumn and winter, the further north we move, the easier it’s to see these phenomena of mother nature only in this planet called Earth. By the way … the solar reflection is never seen at the top, it is always on the sides. And sometimes you can see half the circle. Nice photos from Siberia. Too cold for my taste.