Not a Sundog, but an Icebow (also called a Halo)!

Darn it! I had so many plans for tonight, but I had to settle for catching up on over 50 emails, updating the Round Robin linking list, and keeping an eye on the latest developments in the ongoing Barbara Bauer article controversies on Wikipedia. Regarding the latter, I'll spare you the details for now, save to say that substantive objections to sources cited have arisen, even as the jerk who libels me almost daily has finally attracted the unfavorable attention of admins who can do something about him, if they so choose.

I wanted to catch up with the Writer's Weekly Question, and talk about novel continuity and other fun writerly stuff. Instead I must post these pictures, explain them briefly, and go the heck to bed. It's already way late.

Doesn't this look a lot like an eye? A co-worker alerted me to this ring-around-the-sun phenomenon yesterday as I left for lunch. Sure enough, there it was! Never having seen one of these before, I took a bunch of pictures. I was sure it was called a "sundog" or "sun dog," but I was wrong. It's a halo, more specifically an icebow (I think). This first shot, which is not the first I took, is the unedited version of the shot. All I've done is resize it. The original is kind of dark because after awhile I switched the camera to the "snow and beach" scene setting to compensate for the sun's brightness. It was impossible to get the whole circle into the shot, because I couldn't get far enough away from the sun to fit the halo into the camera's lens.

This one looks even more like an eye, and you can see the rainbow effect better. It's another "snow" setting shot, brightened and color saturated.



Here's one of the first shots I took of the halo, possibly the first. This was on the automatic setting. It's been darkened.



I can't decide whether I like this better than the one with the palm trees clumped together, so I'm showing you both. Again it's a snow setting shot, brightened and color saturated.




And last, here's another of the earlier automatic setting shots, darkened and saturated. The camera wanted to color-correct for the tree, which washed out the icebow. Still, it cleaned up well, and I like the effect where the tree meets the circle.

I've been working on what amounts to a new scene for Mages. I've been writing it at lunch for the past couple of days. Originally it was going to be a prologue, but I don't want to give the book a prologue. I'll have to fit it in somewhere else. For those of you who have read Mages of Mâvarin in manuscript, it's an earlier introduction to Keni - much earlier, which may be a problem. I've got to do it, though, to establish what happened to Dendoris (who?) and when and how.

Karen

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