At the end of Thanksgiving Day when the sun was setting over Sumterville, Florida, Paula Phillips took a break from her meal, stepped outside and saw something odd--a pair of luminous 'Vs' in the deepening twilight:
V-Shaped Halo
© Paula Phillips
"I've never seen anything like this before," says Phillips. "I photographed the phenomenon with a simple small Samsung camera."

They're sun halos, caused by sunlight shining through ice crystals. Atmospheric optics expert Les Cowley explains:
"These two 'V' shaped halos, one rare and one common, change shape dramatically as the sun climbs," he says. "Near sunrise or sunset is the only time to catch them like this. The lower 'V' is an upper tangent arc from horizontal hexagonal prisms of ice.

The upper one is a rare sunvex Parry arc from similar crystals that - strangely - are fixed so that two prism faces are always horizontal. In the full-sized image, we also see just a trace of a 22o halo and stretching upwards from the sun a sun pillar."
"I find it odd that I saw this in Florida!" continues Phillips. Yet Florida has ice crystal, too. The atmosphere 5 to 10 km above the Sunshine State is always cold enough for water to freeze.

"Florida and other warm places get plenty of halos--some of them exceedingly rare," says Cowley. "Look for them everywhere, winter and summer."