A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
mock sun
A mock sun is a bright patch of light beside the sun, at the same height above the horizon and about 22 degrees to one side, often carrying a spectrum with red on the inner edge and a white tail streaming outward. They come in pairs, one on each side, and they are produced by sunlight refracting through flat plate-shaped ice crystals drifting horizontally in high cloud. The commoner name is sundog.
Etymology
The English name is old and literal: a false sun, mocking the real one. The formal term is parhelion, Greek for beside the sun, and the moon produces the same thing as a paraselene, or moondog. Where the name sundog comes from is not established, and the explanations offered — that they follow the sun like dogs, or a Norse derivation — are guesses.
Notes
Mock suns are far more common than most people realize and are visible somewhere most weeks, usually low in the sky in the hour after sunrise or before sunset when the crystals are correctly aligned. The oldest known depiction is a painting recording a complex halo display over Stockholm on 20 April 1535, which is discussed in the lexicon under anthelion.