ikenbot:

Look! Up in the sky! It’s…it’s… it’s an amazing optics display

Everything you’re seeing here is pretty well understood: they all have a name and a specific set of circumstances under which you can see them.

The Sun is the bright blob near the horizon. It’s circled by the 22° halo, a fairly common optical effect in the winter; I see dozens every season. On either side of the Sun are parhelia, nicknamed sundogs. Those are the teardrop-shaped rainbows. Sometimes, as seen here, these stretch out into long streamers called parhelic circles. They are parallel to the horizon but in this wide-angle shot the shape is distorted, bending them up.

Directly above the Sun, dipping down to touch the halo (the math term for this is osculating, which means kissing) is a gull-wing curve called the tangent arc. Above it, connecting the “wings”, is the Parry arc.