#536 the sun halo

On Wednesday June 15, T and I were playing catch in the pool by the beach at the Bahia Principe resort on Cayo Levantado, Dominican Republic. We'd invented this game where we had a soft ball that we tossed back and forth to each other. If one of us missed the ball, the other person scored a point. The ball would get heavy and wet and sometimes it was just plain hard to catch. We had hours of fun playing this little game together.

It was a beautiful day (as most of the days were!) The sky was a brilliant blue, the air was warm, there was just enough of a breeze to keep the temperature comfortable and the humidity didn't seem overpowering.

So there we were, throwing this ball back and forth. T threw the ball to me and it went way over my head (not catch-able) but I jumped up to try to get it. I looked up at the sky and this is what I saw:

There was an incredible "halo" all around the sun in a perfect circle. It was huge. The picture is nice but doesn't do it justice. Imagine the sky outside the circle is bright, bright blue. Then you have the outer circle, the halo, and you can faintly distinguish the colors of the rainbow in the circle. Then the sky inside the halo was a little darker blue and the brilliant shiny sun right in the center. I've never seen anything like it.

I pointed to the sky. "Look at that," I called out to T or to anyone who was listening.

T looked up. "Oh yeah. I've seen that before," he said.

"Really?" I said. "When?"

"In third grade, at lunchtime. I thought it meant the aliens were coming. It freaked me out. You remember stuff like that."

I shook my head. But our conversation had aroused interest from other people in the area. There was a French Canadian couple sitting in the lounge chairs next to ours and they were really excited about the sight. Pretty soon all the people at the pool were looking up at the sky, shading their eyes against the bright sunlight.

I hopped out of the pool and grabbed my camera. It was kind of hard to take a picture of the sun, but I snapped some off.

If you click on the picture, you'll get a bigger image of it. I love how you can see the little sort of furry-looking things around the halo. MT says that is the sun.

None of us could really figure out what the phenomenon was called or what caused it. MT was in the pool having a SCUBA lesson at the time. When he came up, T pointed out the sight. Both MT and the divemaster/instructor said it was a "sun dog" and Bryan, the divemaster, said it was the biggest one he'd ever seen. The French Canadian man sitting near me had an iPod Touch and he Googled something. He said there had been a lunar eclipse that morning, and maybe what we were seeing was the tail-end of the eclipse. Other people were saying that it meant that a big storm was coming. (It did rain, thunder and lightning later that afternoon, but it wasn't a big storm.)

When I got home and looked at the picture on my computer, I thought it looked like a halo around the sun. I Googled "sun halo" and sure enough, there are other images out there that look like mine. It's caused by humidity or moisture in the air or something. I'm not scientific. I don't really care how it got there, I just feel so fortunate that I got to see it. It was there for a pretty long time. I kept checking the sky and watching it. It would fade a little, then come back.

It was really one of the most amazing things I've ever seen in the sky.

I posted the picture on Facebook and a friend of mine, who is a really great photographer, suggested that I submit the photo to National Geographic magazine. They have a feature called "Your Shots." Every week day, the editors select a dozen pictures, the call it the Daily Dozen. People can vote on the pictures and the ones that get the most votes get to be in National Geographic magazine. So far, mine hasn't shown up on the Daily Dozen, but if it does, I will certainly let all seven of you know. Hopefully then you will tell seven friends to vote for me and so on. How wonderful, amazing and cool would it be to have a photo published in National Geographic? There'd be no living with me after that. :-)

That's all I've got for today. Hasta luego!