Photos

After a nice little hike in the Finger Lakes National Forest, I was returning to the car, when I noticed that the interesting clouds. It was already close to sunset so I took the tripod and set up the camera, hoping to get some sunset images. There were some homes on the horizon and the ubiquitous telephone/electricity poles, so I decided to frame above them to the top of the hills near Seneca lake. The shots were decent but nothing spectacular, and after the sun got behind the hills I was ready to pack. And then, to our surprise, a column of reddish light lit on the sky. I heard about sun pillars, but this was the first time to actually see one. This is one of the images I took in the few minutes the pillar was visible. Technically it is outside Ithaca, but I guess Ithaca is the closest location in the cities list.

The explanation: When the air is cold and the Sun is rising or setting, falling ice crystals can reflect sunlight and create an unusual column of light. Ice sometimes forms flat, stop-sign shaped crystals as it falls from high-level clouds. Air resistance causes these crystals to lie nearly flat much of the time as they flutter to the ground. Sunlight reflects off crystals that are properly aligned, creating the sun-pillar effect. A full discussion on the physics of light pillars (as they may also appear because of moonlight) is available on Weather Eyes.

Other sun pillar images are available on NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (here and here) or on TE (here and here). Hope you'll enjoy the image, any comments highly appreciated.