Not quite sun dogs

[Enzp]

As an avid skywatcher but ignorant of terms let me ask as follows.

I am always watching for sun dogs, but yesterday morning driving east at dawn I saw something I see now and then. With the sun still under the horizon there was a vertical column of light projecting up from it. The column is exactly the width of the sun's disc. The column is straight sided, a vertical stripe in the sky of brighter light than just the illumination. And in fact the effect remained after sun up - sun was a deep red that day so not as bright as on a clearer day. The sun brightened as it rose to obscure the effect. SOme thin clouds in sky. I am wondering what the name of this phenomenon is.

Further, when the air is very cold at night - I mean 10-20 below - bright sources of light like the lights over parking lots, street lamps, any bright point of light generates what I call ice spikes for want of a real name. These are vertical stripes of light extending vertically from the light source. It resembles the ressult of a smear on your windshield, but it is a real phenomenon, because even if the light itself is behind something, the ice spike is still visible. You can tell you will be going to see a light coming around a building because of the spike projecting over the building for example. So in other words it is not an artifact of my glasses, eye lenses, window glass etc. I believe this phenomenon is due to ice crystals that form from water vapor in the air at these low temperatures.

So. WOuld my column of light over the sun be the same phenomenon? Or just a similar result from alternate causes? I would hypothesize the ice crystals in the air aloft might act the same as the surface air in winter.

Can anyone help shed some...light... on this? (sorry)

[frogesque]

Sun Pillars

Explanation

All sorts of other phenomena are described at Atmospheric Optics

[Swift]

Pretty cool Enzp. I happen to also see a pretty nice sun pillar yesterday on the way to work. Guess we had similar air in Ohio.
frogesque is right about that website, very cool site.

[eburacum45]

I saw a nce sun pillar last yaer;
the other phenomenon, light pillars from streetlamps et cetera, is nicely displayed in this APOD from 2002
http://www.star.ucl.ac.uk/~apod/apod/ap020902.html

[frogesque]

Thanks for the link eburacum45, very impressive, I hadn't seen that pic before.

[Enzp]

Cool, thank you very much. More to explore.

[Enzp]

Having now had a chance to go through those sites, thanks again, those are wonderful resources. I was right, the two are the same phenomenon then.

My favorite thing in the night sky is the aurora, but in the daylight, sundogs do it for me. I often am out at dawn and dusk, and watching planets rise and set, but I have never seen the Venus pillar. That was something.

[frogesque]

Aurora are awesome but for absolute pretty and beautiful nacreous clouds are out of this world. I have only ever seen them once and no photograph ever does them justice especially since the time I saw them there were no other clouds in sight. Just the whole of the western sky shimmering with opalescence. It was a bitterly cold February day and I was leaving work. I just parked up and watched them for over an hour.

[Romanus]

Living far south, I've only seen a sun pillar once, so it's a big production for me.