Stephen James O’Meara’s secret sky: The Cystal Palace (part 1)

As we stand on winter’s doorstep, keep your eye on the daytime sky. Now is the time when high-level clouds regularly appear. It’s also when sunlight interacting with clouds’ ice crystals can produce a wide variety of colorful sky phenomena. So let me introduce you to the “Crystal Palace” of daytime wonder. We’ll start with the palace’s brightest components: the 22° halo around the Sun and its companion sundogs: patches of light that resemble the Sun. As Barry Lopez notes in his 1986 best-selling book Arctic Dreams, “Seeing them … is largely a matter of training yourself to look.”